There’s a fairy-tale quality to the narrative voice and extreme premises of this book that some will find endearing.
He’s a celebrity dentist and a prince of a guy; she’s a damaged, brilliant young woman obsessed with someone she dated in college. Can their marriage be saved?
Lizzie Bultmann, the protagonist of celebrity librarian Pearl’s (Book Lust To Go, 2010, etc.) debut novel, is the daughter of a pair of famous behavioral psychologists at the University of Michigan who raised her not as a loved one but as an experimental subject. Partly because she wants them to “wake…up enough to finally see her” for the extremely unhappy person she is, and also because she somehow thinks it will be fun, she embarks on what she calls The Great Game, in which she has sex with all 23 starters of her high school football team, one per week. Originally, she and her best friend were going to each take half, but the other girl was just joking around. Lizzie grimly executes her plan, resulting in a permanent “post-game show” in her head in which voices berate her for “what a terrible person she’d been and always would be.” The next time Lizzie has sex it is with Jack, a boy she falls madly in love with at college; they bond over their mutual admiration for the poetry of A.E. Housman. (Lots of fun literary references in this book, including a shoutout to Julie Hecht.) Two months later, Jack finds out about The Great Game thanks to an article her evil parents have published in Psychology Today. He disappears forthwith. Though Lizzie begins dating and ultimately marries a boy named George Goldrosen, she never stops thinking about Jack and never loves George. George knows she is profoundly depressed and doesn’t really love him, though he doesn’t know about either Jack or The Great Game—in any case, he's so smitten he just doesn’t care. As he’s busy becoming a famous dentist, Lizzie spends her days in the library, looking through phone books trying to find Jack. This doesn’t seem very believable, but neither does the football team thing or the mad scientist parents or even the marriage.
There’s a fairy-tale quality to the narrative voice and extreme premises of this book that some will find endearing.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6289-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
