A story of love and loyalty that takes time to get going but eventually finds a sharp moral focus.
An epistolary novella follows the struggles of a Greek American family and the Greek immigrant nanny who worked for them.
Cotsirilos’ protagonist is 66-year-old Nick Milonas, a married criminal defense lawyer in Southern California who’s the father of 17-year-old twins, Tessa and Maddie. He and Tessa clash over his defense of guilty clients, and Nick contemplates her emotional conclusions about criminality and justice with an attitude that swings between rashness and reflection. Over the course of a sleepless night, his musings are interspersed with flashbacks to his childhood with his Greek nanny, Xanthi, who died in 1994. Her daughter, Koula, recently sent Nick bundles of letters that she and Xanthi sent each other over the years. Cotsirilos’ portrayal of Nick’s relationships with his wife and daughters feels somewhat superficial. However, he strikes a more nuanced and purposeful tone in Xanthi’s letters, which are familial and sympathetic. As Nick reads through the correspondence, readers catch glimpses of American life as seen through an immigrant’s eyes, as Xanthi gingerly entrusts her fate to the Milonas family and becomes an indispensable maternal figure. Just as importantly, readers get flashes of Xanthi’s life in war-torn Greece, which starkly contrasts with the lush surroundings of mid-20th-century America. Over the course of the novella, Xanthi hints at a grisly past that she’s kept from everyone around her, but she eventually confesses her darkest secret to teenage Nick before leaving the family for good. Xanthi leaves Nick, and the reader, with a question to puzzle over: “Are courage and honesty the same? Or do they eat one another.” This novella tackles the relationship between justice and morality and asserts that, above all, “the human story needs a champion.” Ultimately, however, it offers more questions than answers.
A story of love and loyalty that takes time to get going but eventually finds a sharp moral focus.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9916037-1-8
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Los Galesburg Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2022
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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