Metcalfe's novel is at its best in portraying everyday moments as the parent of an autistic child.
A single father is at professional, familial, and romantic crossroads simultaneously.
Michael Hodge, father to an autistic 7-year-old boy named Jamie, is already stretched thin in his efforts to keep his contracting business afloat and his six-month relationship with Fari, an Iranian-American psychologist, on track. This fragile balance is threatened when his mother, in the early stages of dementia, accidentally burns down her house while she's caring for Jamie and when his estranged wife, Anita, abruptly returns after abandoning their family years earlier. Michael is a former professional surfer whose father drowned; the novel takes its title from The American Practical Navigator and intersperses excerpts from the manual throughout. As a literary device, these excerpts don’t quite succeed in adding an extra dimension to the novel or provoking deeper questions; instead, Michael’s own coming-to-terms with the ocean as he makes a surfboard for his son serves as an interesting internal narrative entirely on its own. In an attempt to offer insight to all of its characters, the novel at times neglects the more intriguing relationships between Michael and both Fari and Anita, as well as Jamie’s relationship with both of his parents. Metcalfe’s experience writing movies and plays is on full display in this novel, as its strongest moments are in its powerful short scenes, which shift frequently to offer insight into multiple characters. Yet at times, especially in the beginning, these short scenes also create a sense of choppiness and detachment. Once the novel has provided more background on Michael, Fari, and Anita, the rhythm begins to work with the connections between the characters, and the novel becomes an engaging read.
Metcalfe's novel is at its best in portraying everyday moments as the parent of an autistic child.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07532-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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