An overlong story of self-discovery.
In Robitaille’s debut novel, two childhood friends follow different paths in the 1960s and beyond.
In 2017, Jimmy LeMond is watching a peculiar news story on television: A shrimping boat crewed by a group of LGBTQ environmentalists has purposely hit an oil company’s ship in the Gulf of Mexico. The crew’s captain is a trans woman named Patty LeBlanc, but Jimmy, who knew her in high school, remembers her from before she came out as trans. The two shared a strong bond that was only strengthened after a fishing trip, during which Jimmy’s friend lost a finger—as well as a father. (Jimmy still isn’t sure exactly what happened during the outing, as he fainted during key moments.) The two lost touch after high school; Jimmy went to college and became involved in protesting the Vietnam War, developing a deep appreciation for Herman Melville along the way and working on an intricate digital project called Bartleby’s Revenge. His friend went to Vietnam as a Mennonite peace worker and found a deeper level of truth there. After four decades, can Jimmy reconnect with Patty and learn about all that’s happened to the person whom he thinks of as his Bartleby? Robitaille’s prose is smooth and sharp-eyed, as when Jimmy sees his mother for the first time after returning from college: “His mom wore a mismatched flowered housedress and threadbare sweater. Her hair had turned so gray he wondered if she was wearing a wig.” He has a talent for crafting character and detailing relationships, particularly the complex ones that exist between family members and between friends who are more than just friends. The main problem with the novel is its excessive length at nearly 500 pages, the majority of which are devoted to the education and early academic career of Jimmy, the less interesting of the two main characters; it’s standard, nostalgic baby boomer fare, referencing 1960s music, drugs, and watching the moon landing on TV. The background material regarding Patty is more intriguing though still not terribly urgent. For all the talk of Bartleby, the work feels more like a shaggy, low-stakes Moby-Dick.
An overlong story of self-discovery.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4808-9313-9
Page Count: 498
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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