A gripping depiction of the damage caused by abuse and enablement.
A girl and her mother face the consequences allowing a sexual abuser back into their lives in Brooks’ novel.
Preteen Grace is faced with a horrible situation: Her divorced mother, Lynn, has forgiven her boyfriend Ron for his past abuse of Grace and asks her to forgive him, too. Lynn had called the police when Grace, then aged 9, told her that Ron “touched me...on my private area,” but the single mother is now sympathetic to Ron’s pleading letters from jail. When Lynn allows Ron back into her home upon his release, Grace’s father is infuriated, but his volatile nature complicates custody discussions, and he soon moves away. Ron doesn’t make overt advances on Grace for years, but his son, Ryan, now abuses her instead. Grace struggles through school and relationships, ashamed to share what’s going on in her home. When Ron finally reveals his continuing inappropriate attraction to Grace, Lynn dismisses it. Grace finds some happiness with a former high school classmate, Jake, and acts out sexually with others. By her college graduation, Grace has gained the strength to make tough life decisions and issue some ultimatums, prompting Lynn to do likewise. The insightful and often suspenseful narrative is particularly powerful when capturing a victim’s innermost thoughts: “It almost seemed as if, to him, she didn’t exist as he lay on top of her,” Grace muses about her abuse by Ryan. Brooks also offers a striking portrait of how Lynn becomes an enabler, influenced by a suppressed sexual incident from her own childhood. While the setting and era of the narrative are a bit hazy (the home is in New England; young Grace likes the Spice Girls), this novel offers readers a timeless and compelling therapeutic journey through trauma, recovery, and growth.
A gripping depiction of the damage caused by abuse and enablement.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 455
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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