A compelling slice-of-life story, told from two points of view in two different time periods.
Guarino’s novel charts the lives and loves of a grandmother and her granddaughter.
Elizabeth turns 90 surrounded by her family in the home she cherishes. No longer able to live alone without a helper, she now cohabitates with her granddaughter, Amanda, who moved in with Elizabeth after breaking up with her ex. Amanda insists that she’s fine being alone, just working and spending time with her grandmother, but Elizabeth doesn’t want her granddaughter to close her heart to the possibilities that life brings. So begins a story split into two separate narrative threads that follow Elizabeth’s early adulthood in the 1950s and Amanda’s life in the present. In many ways, their stories mirror each other, beginning with Elizabeth’s loss of her fiance and Amanda’s breakup. In 1953, Elizabeth is involved in an accident; in the hospital, she is fortunate to meet the handsome Dr. Joseph Paterson. During her hospital stay, the two develop a close bond, and after a chance reunion some months later, Joe asks her to dinner, beginning a love story for the ages. (“Dr. Paterson chuckled. ‘So you’re free then?’ ‘Free as in tonight or free as in unattached?’ ‘Both.’”) In the present day, Amanda attends a work conference where she happens to meet a passionate attorney named Jesse Taylor, and the two hit it off almost immediately. Life still has curveballs in store for both women, but Elizabeth’s strength and passion and Amanda’s drive (along with the courage she gets from her grandmother) should see them both through. In this modestly scaled novel, the romantic subplot is just the icing on the cake—the real story is about both Elizabeth and Amanda finding their happiness. Guarino’s use of alternating perspectives makes the parallels between the women’s lives even more pronounced and keeps the story moving at a quick pace, never lingering on any particular scene. Though the narrative is relatively brief, the author doesn’t skimp on providing depth for her characters, giving them both love interests and emotional backstories that firmly establish Amanda and Elizabeth as their own separate characters, despite their similarities.
A compelling slice-of-life story, told from two points of view in two different time periods.Pub Date: March 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781685133924
Page Count: 287
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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