Much dribbling punctuated by a few slam dunks.
Two weeks in the life of a man who caught his wife in flagrante delicto—or did he?
When Wall Street executive Jonathan Sweetwater returns home early—an unlikely occurrence since he's usually jetting around the country at the beck and call of Bruce, a hoops-obsessed CEO who likes to go one-on-one on private NBA-caliber courts—he hears the unmistakable sound of a tryst emanating from a guest bedroom in his Connecticut mansion. A glimpse through the keyhole confirms his worst fears—he sees the backs of two naked people, a long-haired man sitting on the Frette sheets getting dressed and a woman resembling his wife, Claire, walking into the bathroom. Without making his presence known, beyond leaving his briefcase in the living room, Jonathan takes off on another trip. A cat-and-mouse game unfolds: Which spouse is going to admit what to whom and who is going to do it first? Every time Jonathan tries to confront his wife, he is interrupted, in one case by his surprise 40th birthday party. Such a coincidence-dependent plotline threatens to grow wearying, until Greenberg shifts focus to back story—Jonathan embarks on an inquiry about his late father, Percy, a charismatic senator who left his mother when Jonathan was 9 and married five more times. Jonathan has the resources to investigate Percy’s serial monogamy himself while he waits for a private detective’s report on Claire. Greenberg is adept at description and dialogue. The basketball scenes, predictably for this ESPN sportscaster, are compelling—in one, Jonathan challenges Michael Jordan. Jonathan’s conversations with his mother, and the five other wives, in colorful locales—Manhattan, Chicago, Aspen, Nevis and London—are entertaining even if they generate scant insight into Percy’s behavior or its relevance to the burning question at hand—did she or didn’t she? There's a superfluous subplot involving Bruce’s penchant for blackmailing employees. Ultimately, Greenberg paints himself into narrative corners where the only exits are marked with clichés.
Much dribbling punctuated by a few slam dunks.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-232586-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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