A wan, overly familiar portrait of domestic angst.
A seemingly just-so family is thrust into a generationlong spate of turmoil.
Dacey’s debut novel in many ways feels like a throwback to the domestic yarns of Updike and Cheever, in which the tensions are relatively mild cases of white-collar crime and white-bread infidelity. We meet the Kelly clan in the early 1990s, as patriarch Robert, a real estate agent on the eastern coast of Massachusetts, sublimates his masculinity issues (domineering father, cushy German post during the Vietnam War) into cheating and an illegal land scam; and matriarch Irene, a one-time aspiring artist constrained by motherhood, drifts into bulimia and her own affair. Forced to absorb this unhappiness are their two sons, Nathan and Andrew. They’ve lost touch with dad, who drifts from scheme to scheme (professional gambler, car-maintenance racket pitchman); though mom is still in town, she’s emotionally distant. Midway through the novel leaps to the present day, as one son has some literal war stories and another is dissatisfied in his professional success. Dacey writes capably about a variety of milieus—real estate and construction, military, Cape Cod culture—with some moments of humor and absurdity. (Robert takes his young boys to see Full Metal Jacket; Irene has a meaningful run-in with The Exorcist star Linda Blair.) And, especially with Irene, he captures the slow-motion ennui that stalks stifled ambitions. (“Maybe that’s all a marriage really is, trying, failing, trying again, until one or the other gives up.”) But the novel overall feels like a stiff arrangement of scenes in service of a pat message that children inherit their parents’ baggage; Dacey's story collection, We’ve Already Gone This Far (2016), is filled with pungent tales of loss and struggle in working-class Massachusetts, but at novel length his storytelling is drier and more attenuated. And though the sweet-and-sour ending fits the overall mood, it’s also too carefully constructed to feel persuasive.
A wan, overly familiar portrait of domestic angst.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-467-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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