by N.M. Kelby ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2001
A skillful harvest of symbols most suitable for the pious, others being likely to find the rose-colored glasses an...
Kelby makes her novel debut with a religious fable set in WWII that will move some greatly while the more skeptical will find it treacly to the point of considerably other responses.
In the Belgian village of Tournai, near the French border, lives sweet seven-year-old Marie Claire Durrieu, whose Jewish family breeds flowers—in fact her grandmother has just spent seven years perfecting an iris now to be named the Marie Claire. But this is 1940, Marie Claire's parents have already been publicly shot ("Marie Claire understands. Her parents were not careful. Marie Claire misses them very much") by the Germans, and now comes the bombing that eliminates the rest of the family—except for Marie Claire, who alone survives, near-buried (like an iris bulb) in the dirt of a basement. Which is where she's found by two nuns, Mother Xavier and the much younger Anne, who together will take her secretly back to their convent along the river, where they'll hope to help her escape, as they have others. Indeed, though, in Marie they may have come upon more than they bargained for, since at certain stressful moments she suddenly smells overpoweringly of roses—and at another radiates light from her hands bright enough to blind German soldiers to the trio's presence even as the armed men look straight into the room the three are standing in. Young Anne, sadly, is still in love (from an earlier, innocent, romance) with the commander of the Germans, albeit now he's the worst of enemies. Or is he? Certainly there's no question of pure of evil in the case of Mother Xavier's German parents. Is there? In a poetically surreal close ("Who is dead? Who is not?" asks the author), readers can decide for themselves, taking careful note of Who has the last word.
A skillful harvest of symbols most suitable for the pious, others being likely to find the rose-colored glasses an insuperable drawback.Pub Date: April 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6666-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
Share your opinion of this book
More by N.M. Kelby
BOOK REVIEW
by N.M. Kelby
BOOK REVIEW
by N.M. Kelby
BOOK REVIEW
by N.M. Kelby
by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Share your opinion of this book
More by Lisa Jewell
BOOK REVIEW
by Lisa Jewell
BOOK REVIEW
by Lisa Jewell
BOOK REVIEW
by Lisa Jewell
by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
29
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Share your opinion of this book
More by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.