A queer coming-of-age story about the vicissitudes of love and the redemption to be found in family.
Past and present collide as the reunion of an estranged brother and sister prompts a bumpy journey toward reconciliation.
Willa and her older brother, Justin, never had the harmonious relationship she desired. Throughout their childhood, Willa’s attempts to keep Justin out of trouble fell short; the closer she tried to get, the more quickly her brother ran toward danger. Now in her early 30s, Willa has not heard from Justin in years and has managed to create a composed and tidy life as a nurse who crafts detailed dioramas in her free time. Her calm world is troubled, though, when Justin appears on her doorstep in New Paltz, New York, one evening, bedraggled, with a bruised face and a mangled hand. Willa is hesitant to court the chaos he drags wherever he goes, but with the man she's dating present, she feels pressured to invite him in. In the weeks that follow, Justin’s attempts to reconnect with Willa verge on intrusive; at one point, he tells Willa’s landlady that he incurred his black eye when Willa threw a water jug at him, another of his brash displays for attention. Time shifts back and forth between the present day and Justin’s coming-of-age, detailing a relationship between him and Nick, a boy three years his senior. Nick’s taste for cruelty escalates the more intimate he and Justin become, trapping Justin in a vicious cycle when Nick brutally assaults a bully who has found out about them. This event creates ruptures in all aspects of Justin’s life. The siblings' current-day relationship wavers between love and resentment, with Willa’s disappointment in her brother increasing as he finds himself unable to reconcile the past. As profound as the circumstances straining their relationship may be, Mirabella just touches the surface of interactions that could have been afforded more nuance and subtlety. With more attention paid to actions and events than to the characters’ interior lives, the novel loses many opportunities to delve into the characters' interiorities; in turn, some scenes between the siblings feel effortful in their attempts to create tension, as if relying too heavily on melodrama.
A queer coming-of-age story about the vicissitudes of love and the redemption to be found in family.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781646221172
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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