A highly enjoyable story of love, wine, and passion.
In Sheehan’s debut romance, a young woman walks away from her ordinary life to pursue her passion for wine—and perhaps find love along the way.
Samantha “Sam” Goodyear is a 25-year-old accountant in New York City whose boss constantly undervalues her hard work. A die-hard oenophile, she often turns to her beloved local wine store for comfort. One night, the store’s owner introduces her to Henri LeMont of the prestigious LeMont vineyard in France’s Beaujolais winemaking region. He offers her a seasonal harvest job, and Sam, further disenchanted with New York after her father moves into her apartment with his 20-something girlfriend, decides to go learn the winemaking trade. In France, she gets a rigorous education, has encounters with quirky Frenchmen, and has a love affair. But after she discovers that her new man may be cheating on her, she returns to the United States heartbroken. She then moves to Napa, California, and sets out to make complex Beaujolais-style wines in a market dominated by trendy, sugary American tastes. Although she’s operating on a shoestring budget, she benefits from her grit, passion, and cadeu—an instinctual sensory understanding of viticulture. Readers will receive an extensive but enjoyable education on winemaking as Sam learns and works. The characterization is very light, and most readers will recognize Sam and other characters as types from any number of romantic comedies (the Prince Charming, the evil seductress, and so on). But the author’s and, by extension, Sam’s genuine knowledge about and love of wine give the novel depth. Sam’s endeavors in Napa are charged not only by her recent heartbreak—and her ongoing romantic and professional entanglements in America—but also by her commitment to making something that both respects old traditions and is a product of her own passion. Indeed, the emphasis on Sam’s dreams lends the book an admirably feminist bent. The text has occasional typos and sometimes hews a little too closely to rom-com tropes, but the book’s juicy, deft plotting makes these minor complaints about a lovable book.
A highly enjoyable story of love, wine, and passion.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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