Emotional upsets and surprises are interleaved with eccentricity in this latest slice of offbeat Englishness.
Susan Faye Warren—wife, mother, worker, and friend—shares the events of her adult life, interspersed with much deadpan detail, in Stibbe’s latest comic/domestic dispatch.
With her singular voice and deep roots in the English psyche, Stibbe has carved out a niche for oddball female narrators set against quirky provincial settings. Her fourth novel follows this pattern, tracing Susan’s interior and exterior landscapes as she traverses three decades of marriage to Roy, her parenting of their daughter, Honey, and accounts of an on/off friendship with the unpredictable Norma. The setting is England’s smallest county, Rutland, specifically the town of Brankham, where Roy and Susan meet while she’s studying English at the University of Rutland while holding down a Saturday job at the Pin Cushion, a haberdashery owned by the Pavlous, Norma’s parents. But over the years, the marriage devolves into something “that neither Roy or I seem to care about one jot,” while Honey grows into an unusual child, although devoted and loyal to Grace, the surprise sister Roy turns out to have fathered with his landlady before meeting Susan. Meanwhile, there are strange goings-on in the community, some of them sexual, and Norma becomes increasingly less reliable as she achieves enviable-seeming successes, professionally and personally. When Norma takes as her second husband the university’s vice chancellor, for whom Susan works, the women’s friendship becomes thornier still, as Norma blocks Susan’s plans and steals her ideas. But is all what it seems? Stibbe’s new novel, with its long time span and variable, sometimes chilly relationships, offers a cooler vision than some of her earlier works, but the trademark tone, humor, nostalgic detail, and skewed perspective remain as reliably diverting as ever.
Emotional upsets and surprises are interleaved with eccentricity in this latest slice of offbeat Englishness.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 9780316430340
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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