Carefully composed, heartbreakingly poignant, and memorable.
Raebeck’s coming-of-age novel follows a teenage boy through family tragedy and social conflict in 1980s Long Island.
“My mother died in May 1982, the end of my sophomore year in high school…” Ricky Hawkins tells us in the opening lines of this melancholy novel. Her death is the catalyst for the gradual dissolution of an already fragile family. Ricky’s father, Harold, moves the family back to their summer house in Amagansett, a narrow strip of land between bay and ocean on Long Island’s East End. It was their original home, where Ricky and his older sister, Lonnie, and younger sister, Tessy, were raised until his father’s job took the family up-island. Too quickly, Harold brings a new woman into the siblings’ lives. Lonnie rebels and runs off to Florida with her boyfriend, the fretful and anxious Tessy turns inward, and Ricky finds escape on the pickup basketball court behind the Amagansett grade school. This is where Ricky, who is White, becomes friends with Lance Williams, the Black star of the East Hampton high school basketball team. It is a relationship that will bring him into the middle of the tensions between the local Whites and Blacks. The narrative ambles at a gentle pace, leading to a moment of searing high drama. The author captures the particulars of time and place through evocative prose and succinct dialogue that reveals much in few words (“One of the first warm days, the sky a mild blue with huge puffs of cloud, I found Tessy leaning on one hand, pulling weeds with the other, one knee poking her white dress into a small tent”). As Ricky rides his bike from hamlet to hamlet, the author treats readers to beautifully expansive vistas that will change dramatically in the coming years (Amagansett still has its potato fields, and the large, elite chain stores have not yet invaded East Hampton’s Main Street). Through Ricky’s friendship with a group of local fishermen, the reader bears witness to the imminent demise of that industry and to the desperation and resignation among those who called the East End home.
Carefully composed, heartbreakingly poignant, and memorable.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781662936821
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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