A story that raises tricky questions about relationships between women and men, the longevity of family ties, and the...
A fast-moving novel from King (The Stones Speak, 2009, etc.) about a woman’s search for self.
As the story opens, a husband tells his wife of 40 years that he’s leaving her for another, younger woman. The suddenness of the news is surprising, and the shock at first unhinges Laura. She’s a 60-year-old grant writer who gave up her shot at a Ph.D. for the sake of her husband Zach’s architecture career. Until now, their life in Oberlin, Ohio, had seemed fulfilling—at least, until she was forced to examine it. After six days of dwelling in an abyss of grief and uncertainty, “without warning, she surfaced.” Laura realizes that she must move on, and readers will follow her eagerly. Instead of looking backward into its protagonist’s hazy past for clues that might have led to the affair, the story travels forward. Laura goes to a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which kick-starts an adventurous series of events. There, she meets intriguing, capricious women; charming, jealous men; and eventually, the firmer side of herself. Using a straightforward, no-frills style that’s light on description, the novel’s main offering is its empowering, new-world/new-self theme. The story careens forward, mostly in a credible way, after launching from a startling revelation. The characters are clearly drawn, and though the headlong pace doesn’t allow them much time to develop, each person is shown to have his or her own secrets. Some lessons are predictable; for example, as much as Laura struggles to learn “how not to be Mrs. Zachary Feldman,” she finds that learning how to be herself is harder. Other lessons, however, hum underneath the surface. How far can she go to fashion a new self before the good parts of the original evaporate in the dry desert air? How can she conceive the boundaries of her self as they cross into and withdraw from others’? Laura’s perspective dominates, but passages from other characters’ points of view reveal how much we all might be living behind partial disguises, even from ourselves.
A story that raises tricky questions about relationships between women and men, the longevity of family ties, and the friendships within literal and symbolic sisterhoods.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1891386435
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Plain View Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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