A darkly comic, engaging tale of adventure and female bonding.
Twin sisters on the lam and a graduate student try to escape from a bear in this debut illustrated novella.
Voted “most likely to kill someone” in high school, identical twins Ella and Etta, 24, haven’t had the most wholesome upbringing with their meth-dealer parents. When their drunken father tries to rape Ella, Etta attacks him with a hunting knife, with her sister joining in: “It was a real Julius Caesar situation.” On their way to prison, the young women manage to escape; equip themselves with food, clothes, and knives; and hitchhike west toward New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee. They previously camped on the lake’s Bear Island (once a rich man’s country retreat, now a Yale forestry station) and know it well, so they steal a canoe and make for its shores. On arrival, they discover a 20ish couple having sex near a tent—until the lovers are interrupted by a black bear. Her partner dead, Yale grad student Frankie races along with the twins for the canoe, but the bear cuts them off. They flee, pursued by the bear all over the island, its moldering mansion, and up some trees, where the girls hope at last to put their knife skills to good use. In this enjoyable adventure, Edelson deftly employs the punchy, staccato rhythms of noir fiction, often punctuated with violence, as when describing the island’s past conflicts: “Settlers were mangled. Bears were shot up. Cut up. All kinds of good stuff.” While the twins are never less than tough customers, as the tale develops they also display resourcefulness, courage, humor, and camaraderie. Cartoonist and illustrator Chiechi supplies comic-style illustrations whose rather pretty main characters clash somewhat with the story’s hard-boiled tone, but she captures action well.
A darkly comic, engaging tale of adventure and female bonding.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73613-230-2
Page Count: 38
Publisher: Charcoal Circle
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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