A powerful testimony to the enduring violence of harmful relationships and the profoundly difficult task of recovery.
Moving between New York City and Los Angeles, Stovall’s debut novel follows a Black millennial woman as she reckons with her past.
Living alone and working behind a museum’s welcome desk, Khaki Oliver receives a card from Fiona Davies, her white best friend from high school in a New York suburb. Reading Fiona’s baby shower invitation floods her with unwelcome memories, so instead of responding, she begins to craft a mixtape—obsessively replaying songs and reminiscing about the punk shows she attended as a teen embroiled in a distinctly unhealthy, codependent relationship with Fiona: “I try to remember what Fiona is. A full-body rush. A cursed experiment in collaboration. Someone to share things—a piece of gum; life—with.” Their friendship was all-consuming, an intoxicating blend of devotion, secrets, and lies, at once sustaining and destroying them both. When Khaki immersed herself in punk fandom—typically white, older, male—she experienced a dislocation between her sense of self and the ways she was perceived and treated by those around her. Things came to a head between the young women, and Khaki crossed the country to attend college in L.A., embarking on life without Fiona. Khaki’s mental health dominates the novel, with depression, anxiety, and disordered eating looming large over nearly every page. In one chapter, Stovall represents those disorders formally with huge blocks of numbers evoking calories consumed and burnt, weight lost and gained, without specific accounting—literally taking up space on the page the same way disordered thinking takes up mental space. In the aftermath of Fiona’s letter, Khaki’s ability to function wavers, and she reflects that “because of her, I’ve trained myself not to develop attachments to human beings. This seems to have improved my health. The stability is hard won and precarious. I’m better without her.”
A powerful testimony to the enduring violence of harmful relationships and the profoundly difficult task of recovery.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781593767600
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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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