A touching intergenerational romp through the coastal South.
Fed up with college, a student embarks on a road trip to find her missing best friend with an unlikely co-pilot—her grandmother—in this debut novel.
Believing she’ll never make it as a fashion designer and reeling from the news that her lab partner crush has just started dating one of her friends, Eve Prince is flailing in college. She reaches out to her best friend and cousin, Ally, for support. But Ally’s response is cryptic, stating she is in “big trouble” and “gonna disappear for a while.” Eve is able to decipher Ally’s location from her letter and asks her grandmother Boop if she can borrow her car to go to the family beach house in Virginia. Eve is surprised when Boop agrees on one condition—that she accompany her. What follows is a heartwarming trek through the South as grandmother and granddaughter uncover secrets held for generations as well as confront family issues, all while having a little fun. The relationship between Boop and Eve is the most appealing part of Sheriff’s novel. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things going on in the plot, causing some confusion for readers. There is a distracting subplot that involves a character named Danielle Grusky, who takes over her husband’s private investigation firm after he is injured in a car accident. Hired by Boop’s sister, Victoria Liddel, Danielle follows Eve and her grandmother on their trip to discover Ally’s whereabouts. Characters tend to pop in and out of the narrative, like Zed, a good-looking cop who pulls Eve and Boop over and ends up inviting the young woman to surf with him. The central point of the story seems to be about mental illness and how it can affect generations, as Boop tells Eve: “This world we live in ain’t real sympathetic ’bout mental illnesses....Seems to me we’d all be a little less nuts if we spent our energy dealing with our crazy instead of hiding it.” With the help of her grandmother, who also has experienced depression, Eve uses the trip to pull herself out of the funk she grappled with in college. The book would have benefitted from the inclusion of a family tree for easy reference as well as a map of the two women’s route, as it’s difficult to keep track of their whereabouts along the way.
A touching intergenerational romp through the coastal South.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-763-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2020
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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