There’s not a wasted word or a false emotion in this elegant, meditative work from a mature master.
A family regroups after the death of its nurturing matriarch in this tender, unsparing novel by Whitbread Award winner Cartwright (The Song Before It Is Sung, 2007, etc.).
Nearly a year after Nancy Cross’s death, her children still feel off-balance without her. Her son Ed, 32 years old and a rising star at a London law firm, is increasingly oppressed by wife Rosalie’s obsession with having a baby and drifts into a casual affair. Daughter Lucy, 26, is cataloguing Roman coins at an auction house and trying to shake off a creepy ex-boyfriend. They both wish their father David, a recently retired TV anchorman, would stop working out obsessively and behave more like a widower. David can’t tell his children that he is “in some ways happier now that their mother is dead.” He loved Nancy, but “he limited the range of his heart deliberately” after a summer in Rome during the 1960s that ended with the drowning of the girl he was sleeping with. Memories of that summer recur throughout; David had a small part in a film of Dr. Faustus starring Richard Burton, and he sometimes feels that he too sold his soul for material success he doesn’t entirely value. As events come to a crisis in London, David heads to the Kalahari Desert, where his older brother Guy has for years been seeking spiritual transcendence. But this is not a novel about leaving the world behind; Guy is in fact something of a nut, and David returns to find Rosalie pregnant, Ed in a new job in Geneva and Lucy promoted at the auction house, making a life with a sweet new boyfriend she plans to marry. A baptism and an embrace from David’s closest male friend end this moving tale, replete with the autumnal understanding that our lives are fashioned from compromise and from adjustments to those we love—and no less valuable for all that.
There’s not a wasted word or a false emotion in this elegant, meditative work from a mature master.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-621-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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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