A haunting and poignant reflection on grief, spirituality, and the loving bonds that provide guidance and sustenance.
Folk offers a complex novel that gradually reveals the individual and intertwined stories of several women.
Fifteen-year-old Samantha, in first-person narration, begins this mystical, often ethereal, tale about relationships in 1986, the final year of the novel’s chronology. As the book opens, she and her mother, Mira, are visiting her mom’s younger sister, Etta—the eponymous Aphrodite. Etta gives Sam a blank journal to help her sort out her feelings of teenage angst; however, much of her writing will be about her intriguing aunt. Mira is the more traditional of the two sisters, while Etta is the almost-free spirit who defies convention. She’s now living with Patrick, an artist who considers her his “muse.” After years of distress over Etta’s free lifestyle, Mira has finally come to accept her sister for who she is. But there is more sorrow to come: Mira, who’s still mourning the death of her mother, is about to experience another devastating loss. The narrative undertakes a back-and-forth jog through the previous two decades. Third-person narration, which alternates with Samantha’s voice, fills in the early years of Etta’s back story, beginning in 1968 and running through the 1970s. Leaping forward again to 1986, readers meet Mira and Sam’s neighbor, Joan, whose teenage daughter, Elise, disappeared 10 years ago; Joan tells Sam that Elise usually visits in the spring, and readers learn through Joan’s and Elise’s back stories that these visits are spiritual apparitions. Folk, the author of Totem Beasts (2017), peppers her artfully composed story with religious and mythological references. The coastal Massachusetts setting effectively frames one of her themes: the mystery, majesty, and inspirational magic of the sea and its creatures. The frequent switching of time frames and back stories is structurally interesting, even if it also adversely affects the pacing of the narrative. In the end, however, what at first appear to be separate tales coalesce, and it’s revealed that it is young Samantha who, through her words and art, will carry forward the legacy of Etta—“the goddess we’ve left behind.”
A haunting and poignant reflection on grief, spirituality, and the loving bonds that provide guidance and sustenance.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59954-150-1
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Bordighera Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
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
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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