A literate and incandescent Nicholas Sparks-like love story complicated by intense moral and ethical questions.
Personal tragedy becomes an ethical and legal quandary in Sibley’s debut literary fiction.
Dr. Matt Beaulieu is a Maine neurosurgeon. His college professor wife, Elle McClure, was once a hero astronaut. Matt and Elle grew up as neighbors, their two families intertwined into one. Now, they are best friends and blissfully in love, their marriage marred only by repeated miscarriages. One summer morning, Matt is off to work and Elle is off to help her acrophobic brother clean windows. She falls from a ladder and strikes her head. Emergency surgery reveals “subarachnoid bleeding and shearing.” But then during a trauma work-up to declare brain death, which would allow the devastated Matt to cease extraordinary care, Elle is discovered to be pregnant. Realizing a piece of Elle might live on, Matt enters a legal whirlwind. It seems Matt’s mother, Linney, holds Elle’s advanced care directive. As a teen, Elle had signed the directive after her own mother died slowly and painfully from cancer. Linney, an obstetrical nurse, wants to follow Elle’s directive to the letter. “It's just wrong to keep her in this state, as an incubator for something that isn’t even a baby yet.” Enter Jake Sutter, attorney, Matt’s college roommate, and incidentally, a pro-life advocate. The media circus begins, growing even more twisted when another advanced care directive is brought forth by Dr. Adam Cunningham, a NASA scientist with whom Elle had lived when she and Matt were estranged. While the novel is a fictionalized Schiavo-like intrafamily moral war, Sibley ups the ethical stakes by interweaving pregnancy with end-of-life issues. Characters are well-drawn, although the arrogant vindictiveness of Cunningham may be overblown. While she does take the easy way out regarding the end-of-life question, Sibley translates medical and legal issues solidly, bringing both emotion and reason into an examination of our collective failure to agree upon when life begins and ends.
A literate and incandescent Nicholas Sparks-like love story complicated by intense moral and ethical questions.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-219417-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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