A mix of lurid potboiler and classic bildungsroman, the story is occasionally too knowing for its own good, but its prose is...
Shrewd study of four Sex and the City wannabes.
This is a deceptively breezy account of four women whose lives occasionally intersect through the men they know. The therapist for two of them is the uncle of a third; one of them has a brother who wants a job with two of the others; still another ends up married to the man who has starred in one’s political documentary. The novel is episodic, driven by family drama, sexual frustration and drunken tirades at glamorous parties. Despite being organized around fairly momentous events, it is most successful as a character study. The women at its center are relatively talented, relatively successful, relatively young urban hipsters seeking something or someone emotionally powerful enough to overcome their studied irony. Although we’ve seen these anxious, rudderless types before, Lindstrom is unafraid to push them to their limits. Unpleasant characters, for example, don’t learn a lesson about themselves and become chastened; they remain unpleasant even though they become more sympathetic. A talented documentary maker and a driven film producer don’t change the world; they become successful by deciding that personal integrity need never trouble their professional lives. Lindstrom’s great strength is her acerbic, yet strangely affecting understanding that the compromises people make with their ideals tell us more about them than the ideals themselves. The author moves sure-footedly between the stories of the women, but by the end, two of them emerge as the primary characters. In the case of these two especially, Lindstrom creates wonderfully rich personalities and quite distinct and distinctive patterns of speech and thought.
A mix of lurid potboiler and classic bildungsroman, the story is occasionally too knowing for its own good, but its prose is fresh and its insights into the aging-hipster-turned-ambitious-careerwoman are both biting and poignant.Pub Date: May 23, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-232-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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