The novel doesn’t quite reach the depths of its potential, but Price is a novelist worth watching.
A young woman navigates the aftermath of her rape in young British novelist Price’s sensitive debut.
In her first week of university, Kate Quaile meets Max Rippon—a rom-com–style serendipitous encounter—and the two bond immediately. Theirs is a deep and blissfully uncomplicated friendship. The fact that Max comes from great wealth—an aristocratic father and a famous film director mother—and Kate, raised by a single mom, comes from nothing of note hardly factors into their lives. Max “wasn’t worried about what he might lose,” Kate realizes early in their friendship, “because he’d always had more than enough.” Over the next four years, their friendship—which manages to avoid most common collegiate pitfalls, like romance, or jealousy, or conflict at all—only deepens, as Kate, now an aspiring filmmaker herself, becomes a frequent guest of Max’s family. And then, at a party at Max’s parents’ house, the summer after their graduation, Kate is assaulted and tells no one. A rift opens: As Kate struggles to cope with the impact of the violence, Max is busy with his new London life, which mostly involves partying and half-baked ideas for apps. Eventually, though, Kate, wracked by silence, begins to share her secret—or at least, parts of it. But speaking up, too, has a cost. Though Price spends significant time documenting the repressed angst of the Rippon clan, the novel is strongest when Kate, whose evolving emotional state—her depression and panic giving way to waves of rage—is both the heart and spine of the book. But while the novel is thoughtful and observant about privilege and power, it is not, on the whole, especially insightful about those topics, and the result is a story that feels just a touch too familiar. Despite Price’s careful accounting of their dynamics, the characters here—even Kate, who comes alive in the final few pages—feel oddly nonspecific, without the interests or quirks or internal inconsistencies that differentiate individuals from well-illustrated types.
The novel doesn’t quite reach the depths of its potential, but Price is a novelist worth watching.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984824-41-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
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
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