A pleasant, entertaining read, light on tension.
In Clarke’s novel, a newly minted Canadian university graduate travels to England to uncover the secrets of her mother’s mysterious past.
Sophie Groenveld has finished her undergraduate studies in Toronto. She and her boyfriend, Marc-Antoine, are in York, England, a stop on their grand European tour. Sophie is here against her parents’ wishes, but she is on a mission. The only thing she knows about her mother’s background is that she was born and raised in York; she is determined to learn her mother’s full history. After an argument at a local pub, Marc-Antoine deserts Sophie, mistakenly taking her backpack with him instead of his own. Now, she is without money, passport, and rail pass. Desperate for funds, she scores a job as the night-desk clerk at The Aviary Inn, owned and managed by the enigmatic Mrs. Ava Roxtoby, who is at times efficient and alert and at other times appears to wander in a daze. Sophie detects an underlying sadness in the woman and feels an urge to connect. (She explains early on that she is “drawn to people, curious about them, and involved in their stories.”) Gradually, Sophie also begins to suspect that her mother has a connection to this Inn, with its quirky collection of stuffed birds and its assortment of live feathered friends in its unique private aviary. Clarke’s coming-of-age novel tracks Sophie’s summer-long interactions with a cohort of Inn employees; an elderly, mercurial Inn resident; and a growing circle of friends (including a couple of potential romantic partners) as she hunts down clues to her mother’s origins and tackles her own troubles. The story is slow-paced, but the prose, peppered with a variety of local accents, terminology, and customs, is engaging, and there are enough twists and turns to maintain readers’ interest. As secrets unravel, there are only a few surprises, but the plotline is addictive and Sophie is a sturdy, likeable protagonist.
A pleasant, entertaining read, light on tension.Pub Date: May 19, 2025
ISBN: 9780994950796
Page Count: 444
Publisher: Nymphaea Press
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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