The spare understatement and constricted focus can feel suffocating at times, but this story of sisterly ambivalence—and...
Two semiestranged sisters spend a few days together in Sweden-born Olsson’s (The Memory of Love, 2011, etc.) latest minimalist, meditative novel involving women sharing secrets.
Emma, 42, belatedly accepts a two-year-old invitation from her older sister Maria, 48, to visit her in Spain. Maria made the offer in their native Sweden in a moment of unexpected (and short-lived) happiness after their mother’s funeral. Now Maria, who narrates the novel, is vexed to have her self-imposed solitary life in her bay-view cottage interrupted and wonders how she and Emma will fill their time together. She feels she has never really known Emma. Although they lived together until Maria left home, Emma had a different father. The sister Maria truly loved was her identical twin, Amanda, whose immediate and continuing affection for Emma as a baby and small child made Maria jealous: “I did not want to share Amanda with Emma.” Maria, who never married and has always been self-supporting and independent, has always assumed that stay-at-home Emma, who raised her two children in a lovely home with her husband, Olof, has had an easier life. So it is a surprise when Emma tearfully announces that Olof has left her and admits that she feels she has “drifted along aimlessly.” With her cigarettes and bitten-down nails, Emma is not the sunny, carefree woman Maria expected. Wearing her pain more openly, she is the instigator asking questions as the women begin to share the particulars of their lives and their very different views of their childhood, their parents, and each other. In formally polite conversation structured around small moments—drinking coffee, sharing meals, taking a boat excursion with Maria’s artist neighbor—the sisters circle closer, finally able to confront the great loss that shaped each of them. Allowing herself to care for her sister, Maria also finally faces the regrets, grief, and loneliness she has avoided.
The spare understatement and constricted focus can feel suffocating at times, but this story of sisterly ambivalence—and love—rings movingly true.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-313169-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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