Smart, funny, and compulsively readable: this one may finally win the underrecognized author the wider audience her talent...
Two very different sisters, their post–World War II cosmetics business, a swashbuckling pirate novel, and a dead dog with a shoe fetish are among the wildly disparate ingredients Pywell (Everything After, 2006, etc.) stirs into a zesty fictional stew.
The author throw us off balance from the get-go, as older sister Lilly opens the story by revealing that she’s dead. She wants us to know she’s not as reckless as little sister Neave will shortly tell us, even though the narrative counterpoint between the siblings soon makes it clear that Lilly is dead because of her poor judgment about men. Neave initially takes us back to Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1936, when the bookish 11-year-old begins reading aloud to elderly, wealthy Mrs. Daniels. When she helps herself to a book from the shelf her employer has told her to stay away from until she’s less young and impressionable, Neave discovers the addictive pleasures of romance fiction. The Pirate Lover adds a third narrative strand with its tale of inevitably young, inevitably gorgeous, inevitably poor Electra, who is in danger of being married off by her mother to a wealthy nobleman in the glittering Paris of the vaguely Napoleonic period favored by romance writers. Pywell knows the genre conventions, but she tweaks them to paint a very dark picture of male-female relationships (the nobleman is an out-and-out sadist) reinforced by Lilly’s checkered marital career (second husband Ricky is particularly scary). Male menace is countered by female empowerment as the sisters build Be Your Best cosmetics to provide an income and self-respect for the women who sell its products. The plot verges on zany—don’t even ask about the dead dog—but Pywell also crafts mounting suspense that overwhelms any readerly skepticism. And thank goodness her tough, unsentimental take on sexual and familial power dynamics is softened by the fortuitous arrival of decent men for both Electra and Neave.
Smart, funny, and compulsively readable: this one may finally win the underrecognized author the wider audience her talent deserves.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10174-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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