A poignant and realistic portrait of the struggles with ovarian cancer that chafes a bit against its frame.
This novel is posed as a book written by a mother with stage 4 ovarian cancer for her young son about her coming to terms with her mortality.
Karen Neulander is a successful political consultant and a happy single mother, raising her son, Jacob, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As the book begins, she and 6-year-old Jacob are spending the summer on Mercer Island, near Seattle. The hope is to get Jacob acclimated to life there with his aunt, uncle, and cousins, who will adopt him when Karen dies, in two to three years. At Jacob’s insistence, Karen contacts his biological father, Dave—a tough task, because Karen loved Dave, was heartbroken when his response to her unplanned pregnancy was to reiterate his lack of interest in kids, and therefore left him and never told him she’d kept the baby. To her dismay, Dave is now excited to learn of his son and hopes to be involved in his life. This brings Karen to an emotional breaking point as her health deteriorates and she attempts to act as though everything is still within her control. Karen is a character many will love—determined, flawed, loving, witty. But two things get in the way of Grodstein’s (The Explanation For Everything, 2013, etc.) natural storytelling abilities. First, the whole book is written in the past tense, but much of it takes place in the present time of the story, often making it tricky to know when an event is happening. Second, despite the title, Karen mostly describes to Jacob pieces of her past from before him or the agony she is going through as she writes. Ultimately, this seems to be more an investigation into the stages of Karen's self-grieving and less an edifying guide for her son.
A poignant and realistic portrait of the struggles with ovarian cancer that chafes a bit against its frame.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61620-622-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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