London lovers and happy families unite in this satisfying and touching work.
Engaging, witty fare, Saunders’s novel of matchmaking gone awry (think modern-day Emma) is smart fiction masquerading as a light summer read.
Phoebe has a last dying wish—to see her two sons happily wed. Ben Darling, unemployed pianist, and Fritz Darling, unemployed actor, are handsome, charming men. In fact, they’ve charmed the knickers off of half the girls in London. But Phoebe wants better for her boys, so calls on Cassie to help. As a small girl, she spent lonely days peeping through the hedge to the Darling’s back garden (her own parents were icy and indifferent) until the Darlings brought her into their happy fold. As a grateful surrogate daughter, Cassie dotes on sweet Phoebe and promises to find proper matches for her sons, but she’s without Phoebe’s blind loyalty and sees Ben and Fritz for what they are. Bemoaned in her circle of high-achieving friends, the Darling boys are the archetype of spoiled foppishness, irresponsibility and devastating magnetism, used to lure sensible girls into their web of short-term bliss. Nevertheless, Cassie cleans the two up, scrubs their flat (really just the basement of their mother’s posh home) and makes them promise to get some kind of paying job. Cassie’s initial success begins to diminish as love lives go in all sorts of unplanned directions—including Cassie’s own. Practically engaged (as she always claims) to the stodgy Mathew, Cassie finds him in bed with her friend Honor. Hazel, who she had planned to match with Ben, is instead getting hitched to Jonah, an even lazier lad than the Darling boys, and best friend Annabel, well-matched with Fritz, is reeling now that he’s dumped her for a haughty actress. Cassie complains she feels trapped in an Anita Brookner novel, instead of Helen Fielding. And, of course, shadowing everything is Phoebe’s impending death, her sons’ touching, desperate devotion to her and the worry that her best, last wish may not come true.
London lovers and happy families unite in this satisfying and touching work.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33940-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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