Fans of Guncle #1 (now big-screen bound) are most likely to stay on board, so best to start there.
Gay Uncle Patrick—GUP—is back, helping his niece and nephew deal with their father’s remarriage.
As the author humbly notes in his afterword, the first installment of this series was embraced by readers who fell in love with the character of the aging screen star and his relationship with young Maisie and Grant, whom he was caring for in the wake of their mother’s death and their father’s stint in rehab. Now it’s five years later and the children have a new trauma to face—their father’s wedding to a titled Italian woman, held at Lake Como. The first chapter starts with a bang, as we learn that the nuptials at the Grand Hotel Tremezzo are threatened with cancellation, to the seeming delight of the younger contingent, who remain 100% opposed. Readers who love Rowley for his banter, his classic gay/boomer wisdom (“brunch is awesome”; “I believe it was the great philosopher Steve Winwood who said that finer things keep shining through”), and his tender delineation of the bond between a man and his “niblings” will likely be able to forgive the dull, cringey trip through Europe that proceeds in flashback for the next third of the book, as Patrick introduces his charges to Parisian hot chocolate, Sound of Music lore in Austria, gondolas and gelato in Venice. Once back at Lake Como, things pick up, as Patrick throws himself into a rivalry with the children’s prospective new “launt”—lesbian aunt—Palmina. At the emotional center of the novel are two characters at awkward ages: Maisie at 14, with her smart mouth, loyalty to her mom, problems with her period, and new Prada culottes; and Patrick at 49, who has cut his dear younger partner Emory loose in preparation for his imminent dotage.
Fans of Guncle #1 (now big-screen bound) are most likely to stay on board, so best to start there.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780593540459
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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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