Pass on this one even if you like the shore.
Lucy Kincaid, a Nashville bar manager who wanted to go to art school, brings her mother’s ashes and German shepherd, Dolly Parton, to a town on the Virginia shore she’d never heard of until recently.
Just before Beth died of brain cancer, she told Lucy she had just inherited "some property" in Virginia, which would now be Lucy's. Lucy didn't know her mother had ever been to Virginia and wonders what the secrecy is about. The property turns out to be Winter Cottage, a mansion on hundreds of acres. Taylor (The View from Prince Street, 2016, etc.) takes more than 350 pages to tell readers what they can see coming in the first 30. Lucy meets Hank Garrison, a lawyer who's handling the inheritance and who, coincidentally, will inherit Winter Cottage himself if she chooses not to move in. Within a very short time, Lucy comes to decisions about the house; Hank; a 12-year-old named Natasha who needs a stable home; and her previously unknown father. There are inconsistencies beyond the way Lucy settles in so quickly after Taylor portrays her as too “restless” to stick around. For example, Lucy explores the attic and notes a trunk she can’t open without a key. Dozens of pages later she's back in the attic, where she and Natasha open the trunk just by pressing a button on the lock. Lucy and Natasha also watch videos Beth made of interviews with Winter Cottage’s last matriarch, Catherine Hedrick Buchanan, the woman who left Beth the house. Multiple storylines from past and present are rushed or never quite conclude, such as the identity of human bones found near Winter Cottage and the events that have driven Hank to want to “put everything on the line to bring this town back.” Lines such as “She finished up her eggs and dumped what remained of the veggies in the trash before washing the plate and setting it in the drying rack” are unnecessary to the story. Rather than allowing the action in a scene to illuminate characters' feelings, Taylor tells readers how to view her characters’ emotions, such as “Vulnerability and sadness drained the energy from Natasha.”
Pass on this one even if you like the shore.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0388-3
Page Count: 371
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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