An engaging tale about learning to love others and ourselves.
Dark secrets threaten to upend a family in this novel.
Temes’ tale explores one family’s limitations and capacity for love. The story opens with the voice of Suzanne Franno, a woman who resides in a psychiatric ward after giving birth to a baby girl. Suzanne is plagued by major depression (what later is understood to be postpartum depression) and is on medication to quell her impulses to self-harm. After she sees a variety of doctors, one helps her begin to process her pain. But due to Suzanne’s chemical imbalance, her husband, Louie, annuls their marriage and disappears with their infant daughter. Even though Suzanne’s mental health has improved, there is no way to find her child. Each chapter of the novelis told in the first-person voice of one of the various characters so that readers have the opportunity to be in the heads of the major players, including Suzanne, Louie, and their daughter, Laurie. Immediately after the harrowing opening describing Suzanne’s mental breakdown, readers are introduced to Laurie, a talented teenage artist but a melancholy girl who has no friends or support system other than her single father. “I’m a freak,” she says resignedly, “always lonely.” Abruptly, she meets a young couple who encourage her to study with Master Shekett. When Laurie meets him, she instinctively thinks, “I do not belong here, not at all,” yet she stays, becoming totally beholden to Shekett’s cult. It will take Shekett’s own financial desperation for Laurie to eventually be reunited with her father and start to process who she really is. Temes maintains a brisk pace throughout the absorbing taleby deftly switching between various characters’ voices and viewpoints. Furthermore, this technique allows readers to understand why Laurie would be compelled to stay in a situation that is so clearly unhealthy and sinister. “He fills every space with his dynamic presence,” Laurie says of Shekett, even as she acknowledges the ways in which he makes her uncomfortable. And while the different narrative perspectives aid the pace of the story, they also generate a lot of drama as characters’ lives intersect and interweave in unexpected ways.
An engaging tale about learning to love others and ourselves.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64388-701-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Luminare Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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