An engaging, unsettling, and emotional story that meaningfully engages with fraught social issues.
In Blair’s historical novel, based on true events, three white college friends navigate the pressures of unwanted pregnancies and racism in the early 1960s.
Thea Miller and Chris Christenson meet at the University of Michigan in September of 1961. Their friendship is immediate and intense. In February of 1962, Cilla Wood, who has injured her back rehearsing for a Broadway show in New York, arrives as an older first-semester freshman and meets Thea and Chris; the duo becomes a trio. On summer break, Cilla takes a job in Seattle, where she meets her true love: Joseph Bomani, a Black man from Tanganyika who is studying at the Kansas University. Meanwhile, inspired by her friend Frank, Thea joins him doing volunteer work in San Francisco, and Chris heads off to do volunteer work in Jamaica, where she falls in love with a local Black leader named Winston. Over the next school year, Cilla faces a pregnancy scare, Chris finds herself pregnant and decides on an illegal abortion, and Thea becomes pregnant and chooses to have the baby and put her up for adoption. Blair’s narrative is an exploration of the emotional, psychological, societal, and familial complexities and challenges regarding abortion, adoption, and interracial dating, the aftereffects of which linger throughout her characters’ adult years. The author captures the angst and ethos of campus life in the early, pre–Roe v. Wade 1960s and bakes in a primer on the period’s history, referencing the Cuban Missile Crisis, the blatant racism, the misogyny of the medical profession, and the burgeoning Civil Rights movement (“A meeting of Students for a Democratic Society. She wondered what kind of group it was. For Democrats? If she’d been old enough to vote in the 1960 election, she’d have voted for Kennedy. Maybe she’d look into it”). This homage to loving friendships also touches on the issues of mental illness and bisexuality. Blair’s prose is conversational and accessible, vividly evoking a time when social values were on the cusp of great change.
An engaging, unsettling, and emotional story that meaningfully engages with fraught social issues.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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