Although the hidden incident at the core is predictable and banal, Glazebrook creates an air of faintly comic menace that...
A seemingly stable marriage is threatened when a woman from the couple’s past reappears in Londoner Glazebrook’s second novel (The Trouble With Alice, 2013).
When Clive fell in love with sophisticated, intellectually ambitious Martha during their senior year at Oxford, she clearly held the balance of power in the relationship. Besotted Clive brought her along on his bourgeois family’s Easter vacation, during which they hung out with his 15-year old brother, Tom, and Tom’s platonic girlfriend, Eliot Fox, an enigmatic mix of willful audacity and vulnerability who charmed the whole family with her piano playing. When Eliot got dangerously drunk, Martha and Clive worked together to care for her. Years later, Clive is a successful lawyer and Martha has left behind her career to raise their precocious, socially awkward daughter, Eliza. When Eliot turns up as Eliza’s music teacher, Clive is thrown into a panic: Will she expose the secrets he's kept from Martha all these years? Meanwhile, Martha has been chafing in her marriage and fantasizing about a life alone with Eliza. Soon, Eliot is ingratiating herself into Martha and Eliza’s lives, leaving Clive to squirm until he finally spills his guilty past to Martha. She is as disgusted as Clive assumed she would be. The two separate. Everyone, including Clive himself and even his mother, considers him a villain. Eliza’s schoolgirl crush on Eliot deepens, while Martha gets a great job offer and carries on a tempting flirtation. Whether or not Clive was ever as much at fault as he assumes, the question stops being is Eliot manipulating Clive’s family in vengeance against him? and becomes how far will she go to punish him?
Although the hidden incident at the core is predictable and banal, Glazebrook creates an air of faintly comic menace that grows more intense as the novel proceeds.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-24289-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
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
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