A lugubrious family drama.
Siblings take a last-gasp vacation to Mexico in Dahl’s novel.
Something happened to Kathy Talley 30 years ago on a spring break trip to Mexico that made her not want to go back. In the story’s present (it’s set in 2016), she is planning to return because her sister Corina, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, wants to go to the beach again before she loses her memory entirely. Kathy’s other sister Becca and her brother, Pete, who has kidney disease, also plan to come along. Kathy’s husband, Bernard, thinks the trip is an odd idea: “I mean, is it wise? Two sick people? A long car trip? To Mexico?” Readers get glimpses of each of the siblings’ current lives: Corina is divorced, and her ex-husband now lives in their beach house; Becca and her husband are struggling with their troubled teenage son; Pete’s poor health may preclude his participation in the trip. Kathy is a do-gooder who does a lot of volunteer work and takes care of everyone in her life, sometimes at the expense of her own mental health (she almost doesn’t notice that her marriage is falling apart). By the time the group finally leaves for Mexico—eventually with Bernard, Becca’s husband, Toby, and Corina’s caretaker, Imalia, in tow—everyone is feeling very stressed. The trip is a nightmare, and everything that can go wrong, does. There’s a palpable sense of melancholy hanging over the narrative. The pathos is almost too much—on top of everything else, several characters deal with addiction problems. The journey to Mexico doesn’t commence until halfway through this short novel, which lends the first half of the book a drawn-out feeling of anticipation. There’s a lot of complexity crammed into this fairly brief story, and the realism is impressive, but there isn’t much hope or uplift at its conclusion.
A lugubrious family drama.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781647429300
Page Count: 245
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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