A haunting but captivating novel featuring poignant characters.
Lehman’s debut novel depicts a family tragedy as narrated by the oldest of four siblings.
Samantha “Sammi” Hollander was 11 years old in 1968 when her father beat her mother so viciously that she was sent to the hospital for almost a week. Afterward, he left his spouse and his four children, ranging in age from 1 to 11. Seven years later, in 1975, he’s still gone, and the rest of them live in a double-wide trailer in the small fictional town of Altera, Oregon. Eighteen-year old Sammi and her 16-year-old sister, Mary, work shifts at the Dairy Queen, helping to support the family. Their brother Randy is 10, and little Davy is 8. Sammi is the family’s de facto mother; she’s Davy’s emotional rock and the only one who can soothe his fears. At one point, narrator Sammi describes their life with their mother, Claire: “I think about the different ‘Moms’ me and the sibs had. Normal Mom, Depressed Mom, Psycho Bitch Mom, Happy Mom, Drunk Mom.” This heart-rending story about troubled people—some broken beyond repair, others surviving with stunning strength—is liberally sprinkled with colloquialisms that bring the culture, place, and time to life. The white Hollander family’s drama also plays out against the story of Altera’s racial bigotry, expressed primarily through the residents’ hateful treatment of Sammi’s best friend, Caitlin Patters, who’s black. The story is also filled with visceral images of violence: “Mom turned her palm up-ways, brought it close to me, to the skin under my chin and above my neck, that place where old folks get all flabby and loose. She grabbed that skin under my chin between her thumb and her index finger, tight….Worst pain she caused me without making me bleed.” Sammi’s recollections of years past are interspersed throughout as the story builds to a catastrophic, shocking conclusion.
A haunting but captivating novel featuring poignant characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 421
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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