A rich depiction of the tangled ties of love, art, and family.
The daughter of a brilliant, selfish painter struggles to find her way in this coming-of-age novel.
Feeling adrift in 1975 with women’s roles in flux, 18-year-old Sonata Kossoff suddenly develops an interest in art and the work of her father, Bert, an abstract painter and instructor at Manhattan’s Art Students League. Unfortunately, Bert, a womanizer who cheats relentlessly on Sonata’s mother, Ruth, and a neglectful dad, doesn’t return the interest. When Sonata asks for art lessons, he’s privately dismissive of her clumsy efforts, and the 50th-birthday party she throws with his colleagues and students turns ugly when he spends the evening at an assignation with Irene, an artist’s model. The fiasco precipitates Ruth’s divorce from Bert, who promptly moves in with Irene and sends Sonata, who veers from idolizing to vilifying him, into the arms of his ex-student Vincent Denfield, whose live-in lover and nude model she becomes. Vincent brusquely evicts Sonata when her muse efforts fail to jump-start his career. She begins a relationship with his businessman brother, Howard, and moves in with Bert and Irene, an awkward arrangement that gets worse when she discovers a dark secret about the death of her younger brother, Billy. Peck, a sculptor and art professor, steeps readers in a sharp-eyed sketch of the art school scene while dissecting the dynamics between artists and the muses who find power in naked subjection. (A model named Agnes “peered at the students from the summit where she stood, as if deciding how much pose the group was entitled to, then lay down and settled into a reclining position.”) The author’s subtle, nuanced prose in this knotty tale explores Sonata’s tensions with a father who can seem monstrously cold—“She wanted to reach up and hug him but stopped herself because they had never actually hugged and he might shrug her off”—but whose obliviousness is the flip side of his absorption in the artistic flow. (“Try to work with some freedom and abandon until you see how the paint flows, how it makes edges, how thin, how thick you can make it,” he tells Sonata in a rare moment of attentiveness.) The result is a complex, moving story about the raptures and haunting price of the creative life.
A rich depiction of the tangled ties of love, art, and family.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68433-575-6
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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