A strangely appealing story with a frustrating but relatable protagonist.
Polman (Mantis Religiosa, 2016 etc.) offers a novel about a grieving widower and his friends.
At the outset of this story, Corey Holt’s wife, Mary, dies in an auto accident. The setting quickly flashes forward from her hospital room to a scene in Corey’s garage a couple of weeks later. Of course, he’s bereft—much more than he even realizes. The man needs help, and help eventually comes in the form of his Uncle Arlen, Sarah Weatherford (a woman in his wood-carving class who becomes his counselor), and an imaginary friend in the form of Bill, a dog who shows up with three canine pals. Still, Corey initially spends most of his time just sleeping or eating, showing classic symptoms of depression. Left with a comfortable financial cushion, thanks to Mary’s life insurance, he’s free to plot a new future, but it’s a painfully slow process for him. The book mainly uses a third-person point of view, but this shifts as it includes extracts from Corey’s journal, Sarah’s therapy reports, and Mary’s letters, which makes for an effective narrative strategy. Slowly, and with the help of these friends, Corey begins to come around and re-enter the world. Readers familiar with self-help books will recognize the stages of the protagonist’s grief as Corey is cajoled into taking the aforementioned wood-carving class, reluctantly adopts a dog, and pursues a romance. The title is fitting, as a key is often used as a metaphor in novels about grieving—but not in this one; instead, it’s part of a nice surprise at the end of the story. The book is engagingly written and often humorous, as when Corey, on Sarah’s orders, interacts with strangers in the supermarket. Readers will like Corey, and they may even recognize aspects of the character within themselves, even if they sometimes come close to losing patience with his finickiness and compulsive habits. His awkward silences, for example, don’t make him the kind of guy that you’d want to have a beer with—but to change him would change the whole point of the book.
A strangely appealing story with a frustrating but relatable protagonist.Pub Date: April 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5307-4013-0
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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