A gripping tale about Cambodia that offers impeccable research and a strong sense of place.
This debut historical novel reveals the lasting reverberations of Cambodia’s brutal past.
It’s 1993 at the beginning of Badgley’s story, and American lawyer Emily Mclean is reeling from the loss of her husband, unborn daughter, and right lower leg in a car crash. In an effort to heal herself by working with people with similar injuries, Emily takes a job with an organization based in Phnom Penh that assists amputees. Her new boss, Sonny, is skeptical of Emily’s motives, believing that she is a privileged American who “has come to help herself by helping these poor people.” Emily is determined to prove him wrong. Guided by her glamorous housemate, Yvette Morceau, Emily explores Phnom Penh and falls in love with the city. A romantic spark flares between Emily and Nick Landrey, a rough-and-tumble journalist from Louisiana—the first time she’s had feelings for someone since her husband’s death. She even considers adopting a Cambodian child. Emily’s story is interspersed with flashbacks to 1977 and the first-person chronicle of Milijana Petrova, a Yugoslavian woman being held in Phnom Penh’s notorious “prison for counter-revolutionary traitors.” When Emily visits the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, a mysterious connection between herself and Milijana surfaces. Solving that mystery will change Emily’s life forever. Badgley lived in Phnom Penh and worked at the Tuol Sleng Museum, and her personal experience is apparent throughout her vivid, expertly plotted tale. Whether she’s noting that “leather shoes were known to sprout mushrooms” during the monsoon season or describing the Phnom Penh expatriate community, the author’s astute observations about weather, landscape, and personalities bring her story to life. But Badgley’s impressive character-building and nuanced understanding of Cambodian history are marred slightly by misplaced commas (“No, I don’t. But I’d like, too”) and her occasional use of dialogue as heavy-handed exposition. Still, these minor problems do not detract from the author’s passionate narrative, which will continue to surprise readers until the very end.
A gripping tale about Cambodia that offers impeccable research and a strong sense of place.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73782-650-7
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Lure Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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