An unhurried tale about the flaws of the film industry and the healing power of human connection.
A screenwriter clears out her recently deceased grandfather’s home and learns about his youth as part of old Hollywood.
The book opens in 1957 as Hollywood hopeful Isabella Giori auditions for a part in an Alfred Hitchcock film. It’s not long before she’s on the rise to real stardom, but her budding career is cut short when she becomes pregnant. To avoid scandal, a Hollywood fixer moves her to a secluded cottage in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where she finds an unlikely friend. Sequestered in the cottage next door is Leo Chazan, a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who refused to name names during the ongoing Red Scare of the 1950s. The book then shifts to 2018, where Leo’s granddaughter, Gemma, is preparing to sell his cottage after his recent death. As she’s cleaning out the house, she discovers a safe full of secrets. She also gets to know some of the other residents of this cluster of secluded cottages, including Isabella Giori, and an intriguingly handsome young man named Sam Kenneally, who also knew her grandfather. As Gemma tries to piece together parts of her beloved grandfather’s history that she never knew, she also discovers important truths about herself and her desires. Told in the third person, the book shifts between 1957 and 2018 to paint a fuller picture of the lives of Isabella and Gemma and how they relate. Though the information about old Hollywood may interest film buffs, excessive details about films, Oscar ceremonies, and actors slow down the narrative and do little to advance the plot. The 2018 strand is more engaging, but also moves slowly as Gemma attempts to work through her emotions, failing to make progress for much of the book. Even so, the novel includes interesting commentary on the ways that women have been hindered in Hollywood both before and since the emergence of the #MeToo movement, as well as the unfairness with which members of the industry have been treated across generations. The author does an admirable job of exploring the issue of what constitutes success while also pulling back the curtain on Hollywood’s longtime underbelly.
An unhurried tale about the flaws of the film industry and the healing power of human connection.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780063422148
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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