Compared with other grieving families in literature, the Wards don’t plumb the depths of their emotions, but they...
A wife reconsiders leaving her stagnant marriage when her husband suffers a stroke, and the family must band together despite long-harbored resentments.
It’s been 30 years since the Wards’ beloved son died in a car crash, but the grief has remained. Their communication stunted, their sex life gone, Lizzy Ward and her husband, Andrew, a retired professor, have whittled their marriage down to merely orbiting around each other. Even their daughter, Jane, now married with three kids and a busy schedule, notices her mother’s unhappiness. On the night Billy died, Andrew had given him permission to go out, despite a terrible storm and Lizzy’s premonition that something would happen; for this, Lizzy has never forgiven him. She confides in Ouisie, her best friend from church, about wanting to leave the painful marriage. But while working on his historical novel about the Wards’ ancestors, Andrew suffers a severe stroke. Lizzy then can’t imagine leaving him alone in the hospital, let alone walking out on their marriage. Andrew’s brother and sister are summoned, straining their already distant relationship as a family. There are often long flashbacks to Andrew’s childhood, showcasing his mean brother and kid sister. He begins to recover from the stroke, although his verbal dyspraxia has him spitting curse words and bumbling names. Lizzy, as his caretaker, warms to him again, and their relationship reblooms. Andrew returns to his novel, which is presented as a story within a story. He suffers another stroke, and Lizzy, Jane and others are prompted to bring forgiveness to the forefront of their family. From the opening chapters, the axis of the novel seems to be the loss of their son, but as the novel goes on, it seems that other experiences are influencing the characters. Readers never quite get to the heart of what ailed Andrew before his strokes; despite vivid flashbacks to his brother’s cruelty, it’s unclear why they’re part of the novel. Secondary characters play well alongside Lizzy and Andrew, evident in Jane’s flirtatious banter with her husband and Ouisie’s role as the giggling friend. There’s a pleasing amount of healthy talk about sex, although jokes of a sexual nature, and Andrew’s sailor mouth, are sometimes stale comic relief. Yet the colorful dialogue keeps the story moving, sidetracked occasionally by the extensive novel-within-a-novel and many childhood flashbacks. Forgiveness comes in moments sentimental but tender, and even Andrew’s poststroke syntax has a chance to shine.
Compared with other grieving families in literature, the Wards don’t plumb the depths of their emotions, but they nevertheless provide a warm portrait of a family coming together to forgive.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
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