Moore raises some interesting issues about class and the importance of money to happiness, but by solving her characters’...
Moore (The Admissions, 2015, etc.) offers a mildly thoughtful, mainly comforting slice of domestic pie in this story of a wealthy woman who temporarily returns to the working-class town of her youth.
Eliza, a 37-year-old mother of two, has never felt completely at ease among her well-off neighbors in upscale Barton, Massachusetts, although her struggling architect husband, Rob, happens to be heir to a fortune and already owns a sailboat worth six figures. After receiving a call that her father has injured himself and needs her help, Eliza leaves her two daughters with Rob and drives to Little Harbor, Maine, only to discover that tough but good-hearted lobsterman Charlie’s health problem is worse than she thought—a brain tumor. Staying longer than expected to care for Charlie, Eliza confronts the choice she made as a teen to leave her first sweetheart, Russell, and the simple life of Little Harbor in order to attend Brown University. She also confronts a not-very-surprising secret she and Russell, still in Little Harbor, have not discussed since their breakup. While avoiding her still-simmering attraction to Russell, Eliza bonds with Mary, a local 17-year-old facing a crisis similar to the one Eliza handled at the same age. Meanwhile, back in Barton, Rob is about to lose his only client, a referral from his mother, whom Eliza has always found overbearing. Rob also carries on a dangerous flirtation with Eliza’s best friend. Less caddish than he sounds, Rob is a good father, loves Eliza, and is trying hard to be more than a spoiled rich kid; this is a novel in which everyone (with one cartoonishly villainous exception) is ultimately good-hearted and well-behaved.
Moore raises some interesting issues about class and the importance of money to happiness, but by solving her characters’ problems too neatly and painlessly she undercuts the novel’s seriousness, turning it into a Lifetime matinee.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54125-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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