An absorbing drama replete with decades-spanning lessons in girl power.
The fifth volume in Riley’s (The Pearl Sister, 2018, etc.) series about adopted sisters named after the Pleiades.
Pa Salt, the late adoptive father of the six D’Aplièse sisters, left instructions for each daughter to track her origins to distant lands, thereby providing material for a thick novel about each. This installment concerns Taygete, aka Tiggy, who is an animal whisperer and wildlife conservation expert. Tiggy has been putting off her Pa-dictated origin quest; however, while employed as a wildcat wrangler on Kinnaird, a Scottish estate, she meets Chilly, an elderly Romani man who, it turns out, is a distant cousin. His directive, to travel to Spain, aligns with Pa Salt’s. Following the formula laid out in earlier novels, large swathes of flashback cover the stories of Tiggy’s gitano ancestors, the Albaycíns, following them from 1912 through the post–World War II era. Inhabitants of the Sacromonte district in Granada, Tiggy’s forebears are musicians and flamenco dancers. A few are healers and clairvoyants, proclivities which Chilly will, years later, spot in Tiggy. Her great-grandmother, the long-suffering María, and María’s lothario husband, José, though dwelling in caves, bring up daughter Lucía to become a world-famous flamenco star. The challenges facing the gitanos, an oppressed minority living on the margins of payo, or non-Romani, Spanish culture, are exhaustively detailed, as are the intricacies of flamenco as a dance form. The flight of Lucía and her family during the Spanish Civil War adds tension, as does Lucía’s all-consuming narcissism. As is typical, so far, of this series, the ancestor story overwhelms the present narrative, which here mostly involves Tiggy’s difficulties with men: Zed, a billionaire guest at Kinnaird, is a sexual harasser, and the unhappily married Charlie, Kinnaird’s laird, is not only dangerously attractive, but attracted to Tiggy. Zed has history with three other D’Aplièse sisters and may know more than he lets on about Pa Salt’s fate. The three narrative threads—this novel’s present and past and the linkages affecting the series—turn the book into a doorstop, but Riley fans will not be deterred.
An absorbing drama replete with decades-spanning lessons in girl power.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1061-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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