Like the many cocktails sipped by our discerning narrator: effervescent, tart, and intoxicating.
A pair of beautiful, undocumented party girls live the high life in New York...though they literally do not know where their next meal is coming from.
As this glamorous, intelligent debut novel opens, 21-year-old best friends Isa and Gala land in New York to spend the summer. They plan to use their pretty faces as passports to the New York demimonde and to make grocery money by selling dresses at a market stall. Since the latter turns out to be quite the losing operation, they are constantly looking for gigs that pay cash. As audience members at a TV shoot, they "only get fifty dollars each, but collectively, that's at least one late-night cab home, a dozen oysters during happy hour, a small bottle of Tanqueray, and maybe one unlimited seven-day MetroCard." They respond to ads looking for foot models and makeup shoots, one seeking "a pair of friends, one of whom had to be Diverse." ("Diverse" is about all we ever really know about Isa's background; Gala, we learn in a throwaway remark, was a Bosnian baby refugee.) Being members of what one acquaintance calls the "precariat" can be exhausting. When the girls try to improve their minds by attending a boring lecture on the new Belle Epoque touted in the New Yorker, Gala wonders, "Do you think they have a list of who's in the One Percent?" It would certainly make things more efficient. The book, Isa's putative diary, is chock-full of aperçus. On the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn: "Being far away from a subway station must be conducive to making art." On a typical New York conversation: “two people waiting for their turn to talk.” On the aloof brutes Isa's always fallen for: "The mind reels with all the possibilities of what they might feel or think about you. Usually it is nothing like what you expect and much less complex than the thoughts you generously assign to them." The girls have known each other since they were at least 16 (that's when Isa spent six months living in Gala's bedroom and Gala got her tooth knocked out at a rave), but this summer will test their friendship and propel them into their next chapters.
Like the many cocktails sipped by our discerning narrator: effervescent, tart, and intoxicating.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-83976-4-011
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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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