A compelling study of messy friendships and romantic relationships, and their long-lasting effects.
Friendship, romance, and rivalry entangle two Indian American boys and an Anglo-Irish girl in Gupta’s novel.
Yash Varna moves with his father from Toronto to Pittsburgh to start college after his mother dies. New to the area and living away from campus, Yash quickly befriends Jay Ahuja, a fellow Indian and pre-med student from the Pittsburgh suburbs. Despite surface similarities, Jay and Yashu couldn’t be less alike: Whereas Yash is shy, Jay is confident and outgoing, and while Yash is nervous around girls, Jay is a ladies’ man. The narrative explores how these two interact, particularly in the context of their various overlapping relationships with women. There’s Rachel, Yash’s first girlfriend in college, a childhood friend of Jay who may or may not have also dated Jay in the past. Then, there’s Darby Baccus, an Anglo-Irish girl from Reading, Pennsylvania, devoted to her family, especially her autistic brother, Hunter; Yash sees her one day and is awestruck, but they formally meet later while both he and Jay are coupled up. Tension builds as both Jay and Yash appear interested in Darby, and the novel adopts a will-they-won’t-they formula crossed with a modern take on Jules et Jim, eventually following all three out of college as they advance in their lives and careers. While Gupta’s prose can be overwrought (such as in the line, “my calves cramping up with lactic acid, begging for respite”) and redundant, the author is able to capture moments of genuine intimacy. The breakup scene between Rachel and Yash stands out as an understated but genuinely sweet, captivating moment of emotional honesty. This emotional grounding holds through to the novel’s conclusion, leading to a satisfying, if devastating, coda.
A compelling study of messy friendships and romantic relationships, and their long-lasting effects.Pub Date: June 26, 2023
ISBN: 978-1777230289
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Rexington Press
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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