A skillfully written family tale with an uneven plot.
A boy and his troubled mother struggle to survive in this debut novel.
Seven-year-old Jimmy Taylor lives in Merrill, North Carolina, with his single mother, Sara. He’s already been traumatized by his now-absent father’s past violence, and he doesn’t have the best relationship with his mother, either. Sara is an obese woman who works the night shift at the local hospital, sleeps all day, and rarely does what she says she will. “Had he done something, anything, to deserve so many false promises?” Jimmy wonders. “Why was he isolated in a gloomy house day after day? At seven years old, he only could muster so much patience. All he wanted was basic decency. She didn’t have to be perfect, only average.” Jimmy much prefers Miss Judy across the street, a nurse and single mother who watches him sometimes and treats him with affection. But the situation with Sara is even worse than Jimmy knows. She begins to hear voices that crowd out her thoughts and exacerbate her moods. She hopes a move to Raleigh will be good for both of them—they’ll be closer to Sara’s parents—but the voices may have other plans. In this series opener, Fulmer’s prose is taut and always a bit ominous, as here where Jimmy asks Sara a question she doesn’t like: “Sara’s mood darkened. How could her son ask such a question? She observed the sky through her driver’s side window. The sun dimmed, and the world around her filled with shadows. Sara’s voices, once diminished to a low rattle, now erupted in alarm and indignation.” The characters are generally well drawn, and Sara in particular is a complex and tragic figure. The author captures her struggles with mental illness with subtlety and empathy. But the novel suffers from being a bit too long—its 365 pages somehow feel like many more—and for having a plot that’s disappointingly free of incident. The novel grapples with dark and unpleasant things, but it fails to do so in a way that makes them dramatic or engaging. Many readers will wonder how the story can sprawl into the planned sequel.
A skillfully written family tale with an uneven plot.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-955323-00-0
Page Count: 434
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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