While reducing the stories to mere summaries makes them sound like either clichés or soap operas, Deaver’s solicitude—and...
Nine loosely linked stories—or perhaps one loosely episodic novel—about infidelity, alcoholism, insanity, and other small-town ills, all told brilliantly and with humor and great compassion.
The narrative voice Deaver creates here is never judgmental but rather understanding, tolerant, and always curious about what incidents will next unfold. The drama plays out in the unlikely venue of Tuscola, Illinois, a small college town that contains almost more turmoil than one can process. In the opening story, “Vasco and the Virgin,” Vasco Whirly—a former professor who becomes a coal miner when he doesn’t get tenure—has a vision of the Virgin Mary. His estranged wife thinks he’s delusional and takes his young daughters away from him, but at the end of the story, in a final vision, Vasco has an epiphany of humanity worthy of Flannery O’Connor. Three major recurring characters we come to know throughout the stories are Lowell Wagner, professor of psychology (and also the local therapist and keeper of many of the townspeople’s secrets), his friend Wally, and Wally’s wife, Carol, a talented pianist marooned in the backwater of Tuscola. She has several affairs and moves in and out of a friendship with Veronica, Lowell’s wife. The title story alludes to the Forty Martyrs Catholic Church, whose priest, Father Randall Kelleher, not only hears confessions from parishioners like Wally (who's assaulted Carol with a knife), but also has to put up with the indignities of a church robbery. Eventually, when Lowell abruptly leaves Tuscola for a four-week rehab program, Veronica has a brief fling with Howard Packer, a Vietnam vet she hired to do some work around the house while Lowell is away.
While reducing the stories to mere summaries makes them sound like either clichés or soap operas, Deaver’s solicitude—and even love—for his characters elevates them to the level of beauty.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941681-94-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Burrow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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