Mild-mannered stuff for a rainy day.
An agreeable tale of friendship—broken and mended—set in the Scottish countryside.
Nine-year-old Claire and her mother Daphne get along just fine, thank you very much, since the death of Claire’s father. But when Daphne invites an exotic-plants expert for a talk at her Sussex garden club, Leo enters their lives for good. A funny, preoccupied man Claire likens to a clown, widower Leo marries Daphne and whisks the two away to his grand, dusty, Scottish estate named Croich. Leo’s own children, Marcus and Charity, are spoiled and rotten, but are luckily away most of the year at school, leaving Daphne to befriend Jonas Fairwether, who lives on a farm on Leo’s estate. Claire and Jonas are best friends for years, but just as Claire is finally prepared to confess her undying love, Jonas vows never to see to her again. Heartbroken, Claire postpones college, travels the world and ends up in New York, where she marries a restaurateur. Much of the novel takes place in the present after Daphne’s sudden death and Leo’s declining health. Claire’s husband Art is looking for an investment and thinks of turning Croich into a conference center (with a condo for Leo) but heartless Marcus and Charity have other ideas—they want to put Leo in a home, bulldoze the estate and put up a housing development. Then there is Jonas, returned to the farm rich, with a Swedish wife and maybe with a bit too much influence over Leo, or so the bitter Claire thinks. Though it’s unclear why developing Croich into a business center is such a good idea, or how the gentle Leo managed to raise two horrible children in Marcus and Charity, Pilcher’s unhurried tone and cozy description of Scotland makes for a companionable, if unexceptionable, read.
Mild-mannered stuff for a rainy day.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-35435-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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