A fun-loving look at an independent woman who suddenly wants a serious relationship.
A successful physician nearing middle age makes a grand, last-ditch effort to meet a man, but her scheme sends her careening in a direction she never expected in this romance.
Annie Kyle is a concierge doctor. She is at the beck and call of her patients at all times. This, she tells herself, is why she can never have a long-lasting romantic relationship. When her best friend, Kelly, returns from an extended trip with a surprise fiance, Annie quickly realizes that instead of aging alongside her pal for the next several decades, she might actually grow old alone. She is now desperate to meet Mr. Right and settle down. Except, instead of agreeing to a few blind dates, Annie gets completely wasted at her neighborhood watering hole and sends out a veritable “want ad” via text to all the single men listed in her phone. When Annie awakes the next day to a hangover and the reality of what she’s done, she’s mortified. Yet, to her surprise, the mass text begins yielding results. As multiple men tell Annie that she may be their perfect match, she begins to reevaluate exactly what it is that she desires out of a relationship. Meanwhile, she confronts the changing nature of her friendship with Kelly, the one social connection she has always felt entirely sure of. As Annie considers the many facets of her life that are growing only more confusing, she is forced to realize that change is inevitable and that happiness comes in many forms. Told in the first person, the novel treats readers to Annie’s quirky, Type A perspective from start to finish. As Annie struggles through a number of humorous and often slapstick moments, the spirit of the narrative remains entertaining and conversational, like a long catch-up with a close girlfriend. Despite the light tone of the book, in which much focus is placed on alcohol, bands, and weddings, Hammerle also explores more difficult issues, like loneliness, depression, and self-doubt. The narrator does have a tendency to ramble on longer than necessary, but the protagonist’s adorable charm will keep readers turning pages to see how she arrives at the story’s inevitable conclusion.
A fun-loving look at an independent woman who suddenly wants a serious relationship.Pub Date: July 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-937028-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
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