A sassy, spirited story.
A 31-year-old British Nigerian Oxford graduate is driven bonkers by the quest to find a man and a job on a very tight schedule.
Her younger sister is already married and pregnant, her best friend is engaged, her other best friend is becoming more of a frenemy, and her mother and aunties are "praying over her love life as if [she's] terminally ill." Poor Yinka is losing it. Instead of the promotion she expected at work, she's made redundant but has bragged so much about the move up that she's too embarrassed to tell anyone the truth. When pressured by her posse to set a "bridesmaid goal," she vows to get a date for the wedding (and, secretly, to get a job, before people find out the truth). Debut novelist Blackburn enlivens her account of Yinka's frantic quest by interspersing Google search histories, text conversations, and a series of flip charts with neon Post-it messages and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) plotting out OPERATION WEDDING DATE: MY PLAN TO WIN ALEX AND HAVE A DATE FOR RACHEL’S WEDDING IN JULY!!! "Be more in touch with Nigerian culture"; "Learn a few Yoruba words"; "Increase my bum size by eating more pounded yam and doing 50 squats daily" are among the tasks she sets for herself—but since she knows this whole thing makes her look crazy, she keeps her "operation" a secret, too. Meanwhile, disappointments keep piling up as well as anxieties due to colorism, texturism, and Yinka's commitment to remain a virgin until her wedding day. After the Alex plan crashes and burns and she blows off the nerdy guy at church who clearly cares for her, only to see him pair up with a young hottie, things go seriously south in the mental health department. A liberal salting of patois—"Duh yuh waah your ier dun?" "Abeg. Give her a discount, ehn?"—and the deployment of comic Nigerian types (her mother, the aunties, the other members of her church) firmly root this novel in a community depicted with warmth and humor.
A sassy, spirited story.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-59-329900-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
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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