A joyful art-world romp from Christensen (The Epicure's Lament, 2004, etc.) that allows aging women to come across as sexy.
After a famous painter’s death, the septuagenarian women who loved and survived him reexamine their lives, in a novel as much about aging as art.
Oscar Feldman was a typical larger-than-life, mid-20th-century New York artist with a huge appetite for life’s sensual delights and an equally huge ego. Although he worked when abstracts ruled, he painted only realistic nudes, always women. Now two biographers, angst-ridden new father Henry Burke and gay black intellectual Ralph Washington, have competing contracts to write his biography. Each man seeks out interviews with Oscar’s wealthy, devoutly Jewish wife Abigail, his longtime (but not only) mistress Teddy and his sister Maxine, well-known in her own right as an abstract painter. On the Upper West Side, Abigail accepted Oscar’s philandering and narcissism without complaint and cared for their severely autistic son Ethan without his help. She also carried on a passionate three-year affair with Ethan’s doctor and now is not above bribing Ralph to put a favorable gloss on Oscar’s worst peccadilloes. In Brooklyn, earthy, avowedly Bohemian Teddy bore Oscar twin daughters and provided passionate devotion with no strings attached. She prefers neurotic Henry as a biographer, sensing his sexual energy. Maxine, still painting in Soho at 79, resents the attention paid to her brother. Nevertheless, the flimsy plot concerns her desire to protect his reputation. Her failed effort to hide the secret behind one of his most respected paintings involves Maxine’s female former lover and Teddy’s best friend, who also secretly loved Oscar. As they muse on Oscar’s life and art, the women feed the biographers and themselves wonderful meals, bicker and find common ground where none previously existed. Friendship and sexual love remain of vibrant importance for these tough old birds, unforgettable and far more engaging characters than predictable Oscar.
A joyful art-world romp from Christensen (The Epicure's Lament, 2004, etc.) that allows aging women to come across as sexy.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-51845-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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