Krügel knows her way around both the salty and sweet of marriage and motherhood.
A woman juggles domestic calamities while trying to avoid a more serious crisis in German author Krügel's first novel to be translated into English.
Katharina lives near Lübeck on Germany’s Baltic coast, but her tone of wryly comic exasperation closely resembles that of popular frazzled working-mother heroines from Britain, Australia, and the U.S. A part-time music teacher, Katharina has been carrying most of the responsibility for care of her household and two children—Helli, a stubborn and emotionally chaotic 11-year-old recently diagnosed with ADHD, and 17-year-old Alex, whose joyful immersion in musical theater feels to his classically trained mother like rebellion—ever since economic necessity forced her architect husband, Costas, to take a job in Berlin. For more than a year he has come home only on weekends, a situation she understands yet resents. This weekend he’s staying in Berlin for his office Christmas party, and Katharina has declined an invitation to join him. Instead she’s planned her first visit in 15 years from musician and former flatmate Kilian, her platonic best friend before she met Costas. But the day goes awry early when Katharina must collect Helli from school after one of the girl's explosive, semi-intentional nosebleeds. Various crises follow. Katharina helps her neighbors Theo and Heinz search for the thumb Theo’s cut off while tinkering with the lawnmower. Alex—whom Katharina thought was gay—introduces his annoyingly perfect girlfriend. Helli has a major meltdown on horseback. Katharina’s musician sister demands help with her failing love life. Katharina gets dangerously drunk with Kilian. The pet rats escape. It all reads like a domestic romp except for the darker fears and regrets that Katharina can't quite escape, like a third baby in her past or the fact that she’s yet to make a doctor’s appointment or tell Costas about the lump she’s found in her breast.
Krügel knows her way around both the salty and sweet of marriage and motherhood.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-925603-35-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.
A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.
Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ (Wilder, 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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