A low-energy novel about obsession; the sparks never fly.
He loves her obsessively. She’s conflicted. The standoff between stepbrother and stepsister lasts throughout Evison’s first novel.
Will Miller, protagonist and narrator, lives in Santa Monica, Calif., with his brothers, the twins Doug and Ross. Their father, Big Bill, a hippie turned bodybuilder, spends all his time at the gym. Eat meat, the big guy tells his kids; bulk up. Soon the twins are working out too, but Will rebels; when he’s seven, in 1974, he announces he’s a vegetarian. Not long after, his mother dies and Big Bill remarries. His new wife is another former hippie. Willow, a grief counselor, settles in with her daughter Lulu. The girl’s features don’t quite fit but she’s beautiful anyway and Will is smitten, filling up journal after journal singing her praises; the two become inseparable, communicating in their own private language. Everything goes swimmingly until Lulu returns from a cheerleading camp in Vermont a different person, distant and chilly. It gets worse. She starts mutilating herself and behaving like a mixed-up teenager, though hardly an interesting one. Only at the very end do we learn what happened in Vermont and the good reason for her change. She acquires boyfriends and then dumps them. “I will always settle for less than you,” she tells Will cryptically. At university in Seattle she’s impregnated by a musician; we’re not told what happens to the fetus. Big Bill develops heart problems, the result of steroid use; Evison doesn’t make much of this stunning development either. As for Will, a born loser, he stays obsessed with Lulu. His occasional dates are disasters. Even when running a hot-dog stand on the boardwalk with a colorful Russian immigrant, he remains colorless himself.
A low-energy novel about obsession; the sparks never fly.Pub Date: July 25, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59376-196-7
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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