An effective exploration of one family’s complicated troubles.
Cooper’s novel tells the story of the struggles of Midwestern family.
Charlie Booker grows up in a series of foster homes after his mother leaves him at a fire station as an infant. At Harvard University, he meets Caroline Tate during a biology lab and marvels at her free spirit and passion for science. Their relationship progresses quickly, and they marry and move to Two Harbors, Minnesota. It turns out that he wants kids and she doesn’t, but Charlie merely sees this as a challenge: “He remembered the long road he traveled before he dared to propose and wasn’t ready to surrender on the baby question quite yet.” When she doesn’t change her mind, though, he secretly replaces her birth control pills with aspirin without her knowledge, and she becomes pregnant. The devoutly religious Caroline won’t consider an abortion, and Charlie won’t consider adoption. Instead, Charlie promises to take sole responsibility for raising their daughter, Grace. Later, Caroline accepts a position as a professor in Portugal and leaves the family, and Grace struggles with feelings of abandonment, resentment, and depression. Eventually, a letter from Caroline results in Grace’s staging her own disappearance. Over the course of this often heartbreaking novel, Cooper delves into a number of disturbing themes, such as mental illness, guilt, and personal ambition. Her characterizations of the three major characters are raw and realistic, and her story ably navigates the complexities of a dysfunctional family. The prose often has an engaging flow and has some surprising moments, although there are occasional distracting punctuation errors that might have been caught with a stronger edit. Still, the author offers plenty of well-chosen details throughout the book as she sets her scenes.
An effective exploration of one family’s complicated troubles.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-385-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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