Quietly yet powerfully affecting.
A random act of violence opens vistas into the vagaries of fate and the complexity of human experience for three teenagers.
Walking home from school in a town near Oxford, Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang spot a boy lying in an adjacent field, wearing “what appeared to be long red socks.” This is a characteristic Livesey description, subtle, with a lurking sting: The socks are trails of blood. Karel Lustig, the siblings learn later, has been stabbed and left there by a stranger who picked him up hitchhiking home from work. Each of the trio deals with this unsettling event differently. Eldest Matthew, haunted by memories of a childhood friend abused by her father, avidly follows the police investigation, but a meeting with Karel’s older brother shows him the case also involves a complicated family dynamic. Middle child Zoe learns that their father is having an affair and starts one of her own with an American Ph.D. student; unpredictably (as plot twists often are in Livesey’s work), this proves to be a good thing. Thirteen-year-old Duncan, adopted as an infant, decides he needs to find his birth mother—“first mother” he is careful to call her when broaching the subject with his adoptive mother, whom he loves greatly. Family bonds are fraught, fragile, yet ultimately enduring in Livesey’s nuanced account of the siblings’ separate but conjoined odysseys, counterpointed by piercing glimpses of Karel, who confesses to Duncan that sometimes he wishes they hadn’t rescued him. The reasons for his wish are among the many motives that simmer beneath the text without rising to the surface; Livesey demonstrates the same respect for the mysteries of the human heart that enriched such previous novels as Eva Moves the Furniture (2001) and Banishing Verona (2004). (The discovery of Karel’s assailant, for example, explains almost nothing.) We can discern her literary credo in a discovery she gives to Duncan, a talented artist who realizes that the only way to truly draw anything or anyone is to simply look rather than imposing meaning.
Quietly yet powerfully affecting.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294639-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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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