Fans of the island-lit genre will find familiar pleasures but also unrealistic situations and cringeworthy moments.
When a novelist writer retreats to Block Island to hide, his new life gets off on the wrong foot with a big lie.
Anthony Puckett, son of a blockbuster writer of James Patterson–esque dimensions, published his first novel to acclaim so fervent it made his father jealous. Unfortunately, his sophomore effort was found to contain 1,200 words plagiarized from a little-known Irish author. (How do you steal 1,200 words from one novel and drop them unchanged into another? Don't think about this too long.) His downward spiral hits bottom when his soulless bitch of a wife puts him out of the house and cuts off communication between him and his 4-year-old son. Off he goes as "Anthony Jones" to a borrowed cabin on Block Island, where his next-door neighbor is a former attorney who graduated fourth in her class at Stanford Law but is now unhappily married to a surgical oncologist who has demanded she abandon her career to become a stay-at-home mom. In secret, she has become a popular food blogger under a false identity: an articulate, sensitive stay-at-home dad posting as Dinner by Dad. In a coincidence that the author herself labels bold, Dinner by Dad is the favorite food blog of the island native who becomes Anthony's love interest—Joy, a single mom and whoopie-pie entrepreneur with a teenager, who in turn ends up babysitting at the home of the food blogger. Novelist that he is, Anthony often identifies "plot twists" in his life as they arrive, and the final section of this book will give him plenty of material, with an apparent kidnapping, a hurricane, a sudden death, and an earthshaking backstory reveal. Moore (The Captain's Daughter, 2017, etc.) has a pretty jaded view of writers—liars, plagiarists, lukewarm mothers, and terrible fathers. This book has all the elements of an Elin Hildebrand novel—island setting, writer character, second-chance love story—without the polish and sophistication, which unfortunately cannot be pasted in via references to Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, etc. Editing could have deleted some of the flat-footed, sometimes-laughable dialogue and the near-silliness of the cavalcade of climactic events. Also, how many times does someone have to say they have something to tell you before you let them spit it out?
Fans of the island-lit genre will find familiar pleasures but also unrealistic situations and cringeworthy moments.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-284006-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.
A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.
Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ (Wilder, 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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