Long’s narrative is full of trite observations, but her appealing story and quirky characters provide a pleasant few hours’...
Long (Christmas Confessions, 2008, etc.) adds another feel-good romance/self-revelation novel to her resume.
Talk about having a bad day. Syndicated columnist Abby Halladay and her fiance, Fred, are only months from the Big Day when the ax falls. First, Abby loses her job, then she learns the house they’ve bought in her hometown of Paris, N.J., needs costly repairs before anyone can move in—and she’s already moved out of her old place. Thank goodness for solid, predictable Fred. He’s meeting her for dinner and will make everything right. But then again, maybe not. It turns out that Fred’s flown the coop for Paris—Paris, France—since he’s bored, and now he refuses to return Abby’s calls or texts. Forced to move in with her parents, younger siblings and grandmother, Abby spends the following month driving around town in her dad’s cab while frantically trying to reach Fred, enduring her mother’s attempts at matchmaking and trying to get her life back on track. Along the way, she reconnects with her old neighbor and friend Mick O’Malley, who’s in town to care for his sick mother. Abby and Mick once shared everything, including a kiss, before he slipped out of town 13 years ago after both landed in jail following a stupid mistake. Abby relies on her best friends, Destiny and Jessica, to advise and console her, but she also begins to realize that she’s not the only one with problems. She discovers heartwarming, heart-rending, heartfelt and heartbreaking truths about family, friends, townspeople, couponers, dog therapists and just about everyone else she encounters, as she learns to let go of the past and finally gathers the courage to stand in front of the crowd at the local pub and sing karaoke. But this touching event doesn’t happen until she captures moments in all the aforementioned lives with an old Minolta and reflects on the importance of moving on with life, accepting others, learning to live one’s dreams and so on.
Long’s narrative is full of trite observations, but her appealing story and quirky characters provide a pleasant few hours’ worth of diversion.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-611099454
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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