A slapstick rendering of Pride and Prejudice also skewers high cultured academia and lowbrow reality TV.
In this modern version of an Austen marriage novel, four beautiful sisters (American, biracial and college educated) find themselves at the whim of their imperious mother. Forsythia Harcourt, originally from Jamaica, now living in Maryland and fantasizing about infiltrating the British throne, wants good marriages for her girls. Oldest Victoria is suspiciously unmarried, and Bliss is a huge disappointment—newly divorced from her college sweetheart (a lowly Latino revolutionary, no less!), she and daughter Bella have moved back home while she finishes her doctorate. Charlotte is in high school, so Forsythia can only depend on Diana, who does not disappoint. Diana is chosen to appear on The Virgin, in which men will compete to capture both her heart and hymen. Soon the Harcourt house is filled with a film crew: Sue, an overbearing network executive and her androgynous lackey, Punch; macho Dario, the show’s producer and director; and Wyatt, the handsome host. Diana and Forsythia are thrilled, Bliss and her father are mortified that Diana’s chastity will be auctioned for ratings, and Charlotte is furious at being ignored. But this is mostly background chatter for the real plot, which is discovering who will please the lovelorn, prickly Bliss. Her academic advisor Jordan McIntosh is dashing and recently widowed, but misread signals would be humiliating. Wyatt is great looking and considerate, but Bliss can never get him alone. And then there’s sexy Dario, whom Bella adores but Bliss can barely stomach. The show takes the whole family to Austria and England for the suitors to perform a series of ridiculous challenges, and minor dramas ensue, but the novel is mostly concerned with Bliss and her stubborn attempts to keep true love at bay.
Satire specializes in ugly characters, and this novel is overfilled with them, which proves an ungainly fit in the lighter realm of romance.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2382-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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BOOK REVIEW
Named for an imperfectly worded fortune cookie, Hoover's (It Ends with Us, 2016, etc.) latest compares a woman’s relationship with her husband before and after she finds out she’s infertile.
Quinn meets her future husband, Graham, in front of her soon-to-be-ex-fiance’s apartment, where Graham is about to confront him for having an affair with his girlfriend. A few years later, they are happily married but struggling to conceive. The “then and now” format—with alternating chapters moving back and forth in time—allows a hopeful romance to blossom within a dark but relatable dilemma. Back then, Quinn’s bad breakup leads her to the love of her life. In the now, she’s exhausted a laundry list of fertility options, from IVF treatments to adoption, and the silver lining is harder to find. Quinn’s bad relationship with her wealthy mother also prevents her from asking for more money to throw at the problem. But just when Quinn’s narrative starts to sound like she’s writing a long Facebook rant about her struggles, she reveals the larger issue: Ever since she and Graham have been trying to have a baby, intimacy has become a chore, and she doesn’t know how to tell him. Instead, she hopes the contents of a mystery box she’s kept since their wedding day will help her decide their fate. With a few well-timed silences, Hoover turns the fairly common problem of infertility into the more universal problem of poor communication. Graham and Quinn may or may not become parents, but if they don’t talk about their feelings, they won’t remain a couple, either.
Finding positivity in negative pregnancy-test results, this depiction of a marriage in crisis is nearly perfect.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7159-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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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. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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