A novel that offers a character unafraid to embrace who she is: smart, sassy, driven, cheerful—and plus size.
A Wisconsin-born New York City transplant sets out to find herself after her divorce.
Sunny Greene holds two simultaneous truths in her mind. She’s devastated that her husband, Zack, has left her, and she’s absolutely certain that he was cheating on her. She’s successful by most metrics—she runs a boutique PR company that is doing extremely well; she lives in Chelsea, her dream neighborhood, where she has a six-block walk to work with her two dogs, Sophia and Blanche. But she still feels in pieces over the divorce, despite all the negative commentary that Zack used to pour on her. With her close friends Brooke and Noor—both also recently divorced—she sets out to discover her successful future. But while getting ready for her and her friends’ “divorcation,” Sunny impulsively decides to try on a swimsuit at Bergdorf Goodman, an adventure that goes terribly wrong when she gets stuck in it. After the resulting panic attack has ended (and a little time has passed), she realizes she has to embrace the person she is. All 5-foot-11, 275 pounds, 35 years of herself. She restarts a newsletter she stopped writing because Zack found it embarrassing; she embraces body neutrality (as she describes it: “Yes I have cellulite, okay—moving on”); and she begins going after what she really wants. When it comes to dating, she’s torn between Ted, a financier, and Dennis, a down-to-earth mailman. And she puts in the hours and effort to turn that ill-fated experience in the changing room into a new business. The novel has a straightforward agenda and the author doesn’t shy away from making it clear at every turn: Hard work and a belief in yourself will result in success in every endeavor, despite bumps in the road.
A novel that offers a character unafraid to embrace who she is: smart, sassy, driven, cheerful—and plus size.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9781250344205
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
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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