De los Santos writes with disarming fluidity even when her plot takes far-fetched turns, but her heroine's inexhaustible...
Marital abuse is the central issue in de los Santos' (The Precious One, 2015, etc.) latest, which is made up of two intersecting stories: a contemporary woman is engaged to a man with possibly scary anger issues and, in the 1950s, another woman faces difficult choices after the death of her beloved husband.
One day before Clare (who, along with other characters here, has appeared in previous de los Santos novels) is scheduled to marry good-looking lawyer Zach at a Virginia resort, an elderly stranger walks by while she's making centerpieces and says, “Courage, dear heart,” which happens to be a quote from one of Clare’s beloved Narnia books. The next morning, Clare finds herself talking in more depth to the stranger, Edith, who warns her not to live with someone who scares her. Already deeply apprehensive about marrying Zach because he has to work “so hard to be good,” Clare takes Edith’s advice and calls off the wedding. Edith dies shortly afterward and bequeaths her house on the Delaware coast to Clare. At loose ends after the non-wedding, Clare—who, unlike Zach, is naturally good as well as sensitive and loving—goes there to recover and to avoid Zach’s borderline stalking. The novel moves back and forth between Clare’s current romantic quandary and Edith’s difficult life in the '50s: her idyllic but tragically brief marriage, her years as a young widow running a vacation boardinghouse, her affair with a handsome stranger from the city who involves her in his “relocation system” for women escaping abusive husbands, the risk she takes to help a young mother who has killed her violent husband in self-defense. Readers learn most of these details long before Clare figures them out, although her natural curiosity about Edith draws her and her best friend/former boyfriend, Dev, into Nancy Drew–like sleuthing. Their playful, increasingly romantic enjoyment of the adventure in uncovering Edith’s past creates an odd contrast to the actual serious drama of Edith’s life.
De los Santos writes with disarming fluidity even when her plot takes far-fetched turns, but her heroine's inexhaustible perfection grows cloying.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-243193-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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