Andre is a friendly kid but hardly a complex one, and newcomer Friedman has to reach and stretch for material enough to fill...
The sometimes, though never deeply, amusing little tale of a teenaged boy planning for his sex life.
Andre Schulman is a New York City kid of 16 (the year is 1957) when he happens upon his parents’ sex manual, hidden at the back of a shelf—upon, that is, Van de Velde’s 1926 Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Techniques. For the enterprising and thoughtful Andre, the discovery becomes an incentive for much careful thinking, especially after he reads that Van de Velde holds as an achievable ideal the “husband as permanent lover of his wife”—an idea prompting Andre to “get a head start” and “begin preparing for marriage early.” He hopes briefly that he might lose his virginity to the unhappy and alcoholic Ronda, miserable with her own awful husband—but Ronda’s seductive overture proves to have been more boozy than real. On the other hand, a job as pillow salesman at Bloomingdale’s—industrious, he learns A to Z about bed pillows—lands him by quick invitation in the bed of an older woman, Gloria, who makes him a man—and whom he impresses with his own oral (albeit book-learned) technique. Gloria is a once-only girl, though, and Andre is left pining quixotically again for his true love, the perfect and pretty Jessica, though she lives in Boston and has taken up again with her previous boyfriend. The story maunders as high-school graduation draws slowly nearer and Andre dreams of the day Jessica will be his again—if ever. His father (a veterinarian who doesn’t like cats) offers a helpful conversation about masturbation (harmful only in excess, says dad), and Andre even finds out, in talking with his mother, that his father has brought less to an ideal marriage than he might have.
Andre is a friendly kid but hardly a complex one, and newcomer Friedman has to reach and stretch for material enough to fill up even this microcosmic little slip of a Bildungsroman.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-57962-100-7
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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