An engaging but uneven family drama.
The bonds of a decades-long friendship between two couples get tested by a business alliance in this novel.
The stage is set for Goldstein’s story in its prologue, where readers learn from a sudden, late-night phone call that a once-robust friendship has devolved into painful estrangement. Kevin Conroy and Margo Weighton meet Lou and Angela on the cusp of early adulthood in late-1950s Brooklyn. Young and in love, and in keeping with the tradition of their Roman Catholic upbringing, they all attend “Pre-Cana” classes at their local church, where Kevin and Lou become fast friends while their fiancees, Margo and Angela, bond over their shared, loving embarrassment of their beaus. As their lives continue and expand into the ’60s and ’70s, kids and professional obligations increase, but the two families commit to spending time with each other. Soon, though, their relative successes and failures drive them apart; Kevin’s drinking ramps up in concert with the failure of his accounting firm, while Lou’s career as a chemist takes off. Years later, the children are grown, and Kevin’s life is back together. The business Lou started, PARC Labs (named after an acronym for his four sons, three of whom work for him), is wildly successful, so much so that the entrepreneur is preparing to take the company public. Knowing that none of his own progeny have what it takes to run the company someday, Lou enlists an outsider: Kevin and Margo’s son, Finn. Lou promises Finn—repeatedly—that family dynamics won’t get in the way of business. That is, until Carl, Lou’s youngest son, begins airing reservations. The resultant fallout threatens to wreck the very friendship between the two couples that has been a bedrock of their lives. The ambitious novel’s premise is compelling, and the characters and their relationships are intriguing. But most of the action takes place in summary rather than in scenes. And dialogue like “I had to smile as I watched him make a show of extricating his large body from his BMW convertible” adds to the sense of reading a tale coerced onto the page rather than told naturally. Many readers will struggle to get past the humdrum backstory and into the solid plot, which offers plenty of rich details but never quite sings.
An engaging but uneven family drama.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2024
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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