An intriguing exploration of a virulent relationship hampered by underdeveloped characters.
A couple crippled by family trauma and mental illness finally air out their sins in Daversa’s debut novel.
Ana and Tony DiSalvo are a middle-aged couple living in Paris, dysfunctional as can be. She’s a recovering addict with borderline personality disorder, and he’s a narcissist; Ana, a therapist, calls them the “yin and yang of the asylum elite.” They’ve both had affairs, and their eldest daughter, Chloe, a heroin addict, has recently reached out after seven years of estrangement. The couple quickly spiral into further problems, unable to have a conversation without screaming at each other. Ana and Tony narrate in alternating chapters that display a toxic codependence for which neither will take responsibility. Chloe’s paternity is at the heart of their trouble; Ana had an affair around the time Chloe was conceived, and she and Tony can’t move past it. Part of the suspense involves whether their estrangement from their daughter will end, but Chloe is so skimpily fleshed out that Ana and Tony are far more compelling, given their abusive childhoods and personality disorders that affect many aspects of their lives. But the focus on Ana and Tony comes at the expense of the other characters, particularly the couple’s younger daughters, Evelyn and Meadow. Tony’s one-dimensional lover, Didi, resembles a therapist more than a romantic interest, and it’s unclear why such a self-possessed woman would stick with a man as repugnant as Tony, who at one point physically abuses Ana. Daversa, a psychologist, says in an author’s note that she aimed in the book to explore the dynamics of BPD, which may help to explain why it succeeds less as a novel than as a character study of two mentally ill people in denial. Still, anyone in a troubled partnership may relate to some of its lines, especially Ana’s comment that “it’s hard to describe how it feels to turn yourself inside out to discover you can’t find anything good”: “It fills you with so much self-contempt that you lash out at everyone around you, especially the people who love you most.”
An intriguing exploration of a virulent relationship hampered by underdeveloped characters.Pub Date: June 24, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986166919
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Divine Dog Editions
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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