An often charming and funny coming-of-age tale.
Garvin (A Faithful Son, 2016) tells the story of a 13-year-old orphan sent to live with her forthright great-aunt in this novel.
When Poppy Wainwright’s grandmother dies, she travels from her home in Arkansas to live with her grandmother’s older sister, Sookie, in Savannah, Georgia. “Your Grandma Lainey was a self-righteous nit-wit,” Sookie tells Poppy upon their first meeting, “and if I had the gumption, I’d drive myself up to Mountain Home and spit on her freshly dug grave.” Sookie is everything Poppy’s grandmother was not: atheistic, slovenly, suspicious, prone to vendettas, and completely lacking any verbal filter. Yet there’s much that this foulmouthed, long-lived woman has to teach young Sookie about the world and how to be a woman in it. Sookie initially warns Poppy away from the locals—particularly the neighbor boys, with whom the old woman participates in an ongoing feud. Poppy manages to befriend Donita Pendergast, a young woman from church. As Poppy and Sookie become involved with Donita’s fraught relationship with her husband, Poppy learns some things about her own troubled family history from her great aunt—including some insight into how Sookie became so cynical. Following two women at either end of life, this novel is a fine submission in the long tradition of Southern bildungsromans. Garvin animates his characters with wonderfully vulgar dialogue, and he isn’t afraid to turn the reader’s stomach just a bit with his physical descriptions; for example, he makes sure to include the detail that “Yellow cataracts blanketed [Sookie’s] eyes, like two blue marbles coated by lemon custard.” The author also manages to tackle serious issues of sexuality and domestic violence while keeping the book lighthearted and highly readable. If he errs, it’s in his maximalism: the book feels bloated at more than 350 pages, in part due to the fact that he provides some pieces of information three or four times—usually, it seems, because he simply can’t decide which phrasing he likes best. Some readers may also find the tone too cute by half, but others who subscribe to Garvin’s larger-than-life vision won’t want it to end.
An often charming and funny coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: July 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5455-6872-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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