While the drama is rarely pressing, the book makes for an entertaining swing through 1970s Massachusetts.
Wesslen presents a playful coming-of-age novel about a boy in the 1970s in this literary debut.
The year is 1975 when Jayson “Jay” Zimmerman is informed that his family will be moving from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts. Jay is not crazy about Boston accents, and he will have to change his professional sports team affiliations (“What the hell’s a Phillie, anyway?” he gets asked). Nevertheless, he makes new friends quickly—Jay has a good arm and a love of baseball that helps him settle in with some local kids. The story follows Jay as he, his parents, Joel and Louise, and his sister, Justine, go about their lives. Jay gets into some scuffles, frets over girls, and eventually pitches in a crucial baseball game. At one point, Jay’s father plans to purchase a sock company and move the family to Vermont. The deal does not go through, and the elder Zimmerman is stuck with an extensive legal battle. The conflict brings a lawyer named Jack Carney into the family orbit—Jack makes a pass at Jay’s mother, but the consequences amount to little more than a slap. The book concludes with Jay graduating high school as a member of the class of 1981. The slice-of-life format makes for a high-spirited account; Jay’s life occasionally takes a serious turn, as when his uncle dies, but the stakes never get too dicey. This can result in some fluff—when challenges arise, like a bad haircut before picture day at school, they do not quite make for riveting developments. Yet the light, bouncy tone keeps the story fun and moving forward. There are some funny scenes, as when, during a family trip, Jay’s sister wants to know, “Can I ask if we’re almost there?” By the end of the story, the reader should develop a heartfelt interest in how Jay’s teenage years will conclude.
While the drama is rarely pressing, the book makes for an entertaining swing through 1970s Massachusetts.Pub Date: June 21, 2023
ISBN: 9798398378177
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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