Light, profound, sensual, unmistakably European: this may be the only book about grief to feel like a vacation.
A witty and passionate woman, recently bereaved, goes to the beach.
“It’s my mother’s funeral, and if that’s not bad enough, I’m forty,” says Blanca in the opening paragraph of Busquets’ summery, sexy, cool debut novel, set in the author’s native Spain. “I swear I’ve never dressed so badly in my entire life.” A couple of pages later, lying in bed with one of her exes, she decides to go recover at the house she’s inherited in the coastal town of Cadaqués, a place she’s been visiting since she was a girl. “The red earth of Tara, I’ll go home to Tara,” she deadpans, then wonders if she's mixed up ET and Gone with the Wind. Still trying to cure death with sex, she next meets up with her married lover. She’s tried and failed to make her body a temple, she explains; it “always remains an amusement park.” And then it’s off to Cadaqués, with two ex-husbands, the young sons she’s had with each of them, her best friends, Elisa and Sofia, Elisa’s boyfriend, Sofia’s son, and Ursula the babysitter. On the way, they stop for lunch at a friend’s dog rescue and marijuana ranch. The tumble of kookiness and hedonism is balanced by two remarkable calming elements. One, a summer rain of axioms and insights: “Hope is the hardest facial expression to fake and the ability to express it diminishes with every broken dream; the only thing that can substitute the loss is ordinary desire.” Two, a series of brief, emotional cutaways addressing her mother: “When your death was still something inconceivable to me, and still is now, we were at your house chatting. Suddenly, out of nowhere, you stood up to get something from the bathroom and said, without even glancing over at me and as nonchalantly as someone saying, “I need some toothpaste,” that “it’s been an honor to know you.” Oof.
Light, profound, sensual, unmistakably European: this may be the only book about grief to feel like a vacation.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90370-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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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