A conceptually fascinating book.
A narratively ambitious reflection on art, beauty, motherhood, and identity by Spanish novelist Hernández.
Fifteen-year-old Berta believes she is destined to bear witness to life’s ugliness, even thinking her friend’s illness is part of her own suffering. After learning in school about prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize faces, she and her friends Mario and Lucas play a game in which they stare into a mirror and hold their breath until one of them no longer recognizes themself or the others give up or faint. One day, Berta stops breathing as she stares at a painting that's leaning against the wall in the entryway at school and begins to faint. Luckily, before she can hit her head, she's caught by the mysterious man who made the painting. The painter, who claims to be the exiled Mexican artist Vicente Rojo, insists on giving the artwork to Berta. Berta’s mother, a former journalist for the regional newspaper, sees this meeting as an opportunity to restart her career and insists on interviewing the artist. The book is written in two parts, “Prosopagnosia” and “The Man Who Thought He Was Vicente Rojo.” In "Prosopagnosia," Berta’s mother, the narrator, shifts back and forth between third and first person, blurring her thoughts and reality, which is disorienting. At one point she admits, “Now, in my mind, I confuse what I thought during the interview with what the artist said, the notes I took, and what I thought upon reflection afterwards.” “The Man Who Thought He Was Vicente Rojo” feels like a rewrite of “Prosopagnosia.” Berta’s mother fills in gaps from earlier as she recounts her start as a journalist, desire for recognition, and events leading to the interview’s completion with the clarity “Prosopagnosia” lacked. Like both the artist who claims to be Vicente Rojo and her daughter, who stares at herself until she cannot recognize herself, Berta’s mother wants to be someone she’s not.
A conceptually fascinating book.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950354-44-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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
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
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