Gentle humor, deeply emotional stories drawn from everyday life—Taylor's books are what Garrison Keillor might have produced...
Taylor (An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War, 2014, etc.) revisits his beloved Irish medico, Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, as he faces new challenges in his practice and reconciles with World War II demons.
The chapters alternate between the mid-1960s in Balleybucklebo and the early 1940s, when O'Reilly left the HMS Warspite for anesthesiology training at the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar in Portsmouth. Living ashore provides O'Reilly an opportunity to marry his fiancee, Deirdre. Taylor is superb on how characters live, work, and love each other, and O’Reilly’s deep feeling for Deirdre anchors the tale. Humor and pathos reign as the scene shifts to 1964. At a medical school class reunion, O’Reilly notices former classmate Ronald Fitzgerald displaying signs of illness, but Fitzgerald angrily rejects his gentle observation. Fitzgerald’s a prim, closed-off person, but once his symptoms become critical, he calls O’Reilly, and a friendship blooms. As Balleybucklebo denizens enter, O’Reilly’s associate Barry descends into a funk since his fiancee, Sue, has met a charming French fellow while traveling. The Marquis of Balleybucklebo gets help from O’Reilly’s brother Lars in managing estate inheritance taxes. There’s plenty of ribald humor—"If your man Edgar Redmond there was at a wake, he’d not be satisfied unless he was the feckin’ corpse." The war years show young O’Reilly despairing over the carnage—"the butcher’s bill"—yet heroic in his duties, and in the happier 1960s segments, a thread about positive/negative blood types gets technical, but following along with O’Reilly on house calls through the green fields of Northern Ireland is constant good fun, especially when the local scallawag decides his ten mutt puppies are exotic Woolamarroo quokka herding dogs.
Gentle humor, deeply emotional stories drawn from everyday life—Taylor's books are what Garrison Keillor might have produced if he'd been born in Country Antrim.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7820-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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