First-time novelist Wicoff has a comic touch with this amiable fantasy.
Wicoff's first novel is a quirky time-traveling adventure mixed with a treatise on the plight of the working mother.
Jennifer Sharpe's story is a familiar one: A divorced mother of two, she struggles to make ends meet, sleeping on the sofa bed in her tiny apartment while the boys' father pursues his acting "career." She has a rewarding job with the New York City Housing Authority, though her newly hired boss expects private sector hours without the commensurate pay. Her babysitter spends more time with the boys than she does, and her future hinges on even more hours at work. If only she could be in two places at once. And voilà, she can. She loses her cellphone, and when she finds it outside her door the next day, a new app has appeared: Wishful Thinking, An App for Women Who Need to Be in More Than One Place at the Same Time, courtesy of her mysterious next-door neighbor, physicist-cum–fairy-godmother Dr. Diane Sexton. Though there's some talk about wormholes and quantum foam, this is no sci-fi novel, and the mechanics of time travel (and the problematic paradoxes) are left aside to focus on every working mother's dream come true, killing it at work while baking cookies for the school fundraiser. Jennifer even finds time for a love life, dating her older son's dreamy guitar teacher. But of course these Faustian bargains have unforeseen consequences. Jennifer is living three lives in 24 hours (aging her rapidly), traveling back and forth in time to be with the kids after school, stay at work until 8:00 and go on dates with her new beau. Time is beginning to bleed together, and her partner at work (also a mom, but without the handy app) is falling apart trying to keep up. But can Jennifer ever live happily without the app?
First-time novelist Wicoff has a comic touch with this amiable fantasy.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63152-976-4
Page Count: 370
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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