Schlock with a lilting accent is still schlock.
A contrived, overplotted romance from Welsh novelist James (Two Loves, 1999, etc.).
After her mother dies unexpectedly, 43-year-old Kate Rivers, a moderately successful actress, returns briefly to the Welsh village where she was raised. Soon her cousin Rhydian and his wife drop by to pay their respects. Rhydian’s mother had always been particularly kind to Kate and her emotionally fragile mother, but Kate’s reaction to Rhydian goes beyond family ties: she feels a passionate chemistry she has never experienced before. Meanwhile, Kate’s live-in lover Paul has his own family crises to keep him from offering her the solace she expects. First, his daughter Annabel is implicated in the drug death of a college classmate. Then, as soon as she’s out of legal danger, her twin sister Selena commits suicide. Kate buries her mother and makes intense, meaningful though rather quick love with Rhydian before heading to Cambridge to help Paul cope. Although Kate claims she has never felt accepted by the twins, Annabel quickly confides not only her sense of guilt about Selena’s death but also the news that she’s pregnant and intends to keep the baby despite having broken off with the father. Annabel also warns Kate, who responds with minimal regret, that Selena’s death has brought Paul and his ex-wife together. Suddenly close, Annabel and Kate return to Wales, where the family has decided to hold Selena’s funeral. Annabel and the young minister who has recently taken over the local church fall head over heels at first sight. Kate and Rhydian decide that although they are soulmates he cannot leave his three children and pregnant wife. And Kate returns to London disconsolate—until she discovers she too is pregnant with Rhydian’s child: her second chance for happiness has come along after all.
Schlock with a lilting accent is still schlock.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27258-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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