An ambitious and lyrical runaway story with some rough edges.
A teenager escapes her fault-finding mother in George’s novel, told in alternating perspectives.
In 2004, teen punk Sheena Taylor died in a tragic car accident, making her then-7-year-old sister, Mariana, “the kid who lived.” For a decade, her parents grieve in disparate, unhealthy ways: Mark disappears into his work, preferring the myth that he can abdicate daily parenting responsibility if he’s the sole breadwinner, while Sheryl searches for flaws and assigns blame with vigor. Sheryl even blames Sheena for her own death, telling Mariana that Sheena drove while high in order to pressure Mariana into being the perfect child. As Mariana approaches the age of 18, she starts to lose faith in her ability to deal with her mother’s emotions. Family violence figures crucially in Mariana’s best friend Cat’s story, with a scene at her house foreshadowing a pivotal fight between Mariana and Sheryl. Mark tries to mend his bond with Mariana by revealing the truth about Sheena’s death, which causes the teen to run away. During her first weeks by herself, she reckons with the nature of her sibling’s accident and her mother’s mistreatment. In the sections from Mariana’s point of view, George effectively conveys the feelings of self-blame and depression that come with years of emotional abuse. However, the sections from Sheryl’s perspective lack the same sort of depth, and her voice is often plodding. However, some reflections are beautiful: “A silence hit at times like this. In a movie, the world truly would go silent. The background would lose focus. In real life the silence came from within.” Still, readers may wish that Sheryl offered a memory or insight that revealed why or how her grief took the vitriolic form it did. The narrative also suffers from occasional redundancy and lapses into bland therapy-speak.
An ambitious and lyrical runaway story with some rough edges.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 979-8986678504
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Harborview Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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