A courageous tale of growing up and standing up.
Five teenagers grapple with questions regarding sex, identity, and morality during the tumultuous and transformative years of the late 1960s in Boren’s novel.
In suburban Wisconsin in 1966, young women are expected to follow a certain path—one of marriage, motherhood, and obedience. Hiding a secret pregnancy while dreaming of attending college on a science scholarship, Sonya Morrow has a difficult choice to make. Meanwhile, friends Leo Meitka and Emelia Demski enjoy the simple but fraught lives of teenagers. They explore the woods by the lake, go to school, work, and attend church functions together; they also grapple with their changing bodies and individual autonomy in a small and stubbornly rigid world. Leo, imaginative and musical, wants to break away from his drunken father and emotionally volatile mother. Emelia, uncertain and fierce, is trapped between her burgeoning sexuality and her desire to be a “good girl” in a society that punishes women who dare to be anything else. After a traumatic and horrifying event, each teenager makes choices that alter the courses of their young lives, culminating in a poignant and thoughtful reflection on what it means to grow up in a time of both great repression and great expression. The narrative primarily alternates between the perspectives of Sonya, Leo, and Emelia, with small interjections from Dean, a young child connected to Sonya, and Elisa, the mentally unstable younger sister of Emelia. Each character is distinct, well developed, and thoughtfully crafted—Boren excels in conveying the tortured thoughts of each personality, as when Sonya laments, “She used to be smart and flip. Quick. Too quick, one teacher had written on her report card long ago. Now she was simply too fast.” The novel’s powerful exploration of repression, sexuality, trauma, and identity is uncomfortable, tragic, messy, and real. Boren boldly lays bare the naked realities of growing up and facing seemingly unsurmountable challenges. Sonya’s, Leo’s, and Emelia’s stories will stay with the reader long after the novel’s thoughtful final words.
A courageous tale of growing up and standing up.Pub Date: June 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1736403365
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Flexible Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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