A captivating novel, intellectually stimulating and literarily engrossing.
In Hayes’ novel, a dying mother reveals to her daughter her family’s long history of trauma in the hope she can break free of it.
Dying in hospice care, Savannah Schaeffer, a 72-year-old retired professor of psychology, decides she has no choice but to reveal to her daughter Chloe the grim history of “intergenerational trauma” in her family. Chloe is a successful physician but has an inclination toward romantic failure; she is poised to marry Dwayne, another psychologist, a decision Savannah believes is a dire mistake. To emancipate Chloe from the legacy of pain that lives deep in the family’s marrow, Savannah (whose mother died by suicide when Savannah was only 15 years old) believes that her daughter needs to be exposed to the details of its “toxic brew,” an achingly heroic charge movingly described by the author. To that end, Savannah gives to Chloe two journals—one written by her grandmother Hildegard and another by her father Johan, both of which chronicle nearly incomprehensible emotional challenges. Hildegard’s life was filled with pain and danger—she suffered extraordinary abuse at the hands of a mercurially violent husband named Markus and was afflicted with terrible depression and mental illness. Johan weathered the abuse of Markus as well, and finally killed him, as well as his own brother, and he experienced the unspeakable ravages of World War II. Chloe is mesmerized by the successive revelations about her lineage, as well as by her mother’s newly discovered open-handedness, a great departure for a woman for whom “leaving things unsaid is in her DNA.” Chloe must contend with the truth about her family, and also consider the kind of life she wants to lead (and whether Dwayne will be a part of it). She is further conflicted about Savannah’s decision to “hasten her death” and her own participation in that process as a palliative care doctor.
Hayes’ sprawling saga, composed of the main narrative and excerpts from the two journals, is delicately complex and emotionally affecting. Chloe is compelled to confront the possibility that all of this cumulative trauma somehow lives within her and affects the decisions that shape her life. “Their lives are mine now as if I had lived them. They live inside me, shaping who I am and my choices. A genetic echo. They always have been, but I now consciously know they always have been.” However, that acknowledgment doesn’t means she must accept the life Savannah envisions for her—Chloe must not only come to terms with a past she never experienced and shoulder it like painful freight but also forge ahead and create her own path. A novel so steeped in psychological ideas is threatened by two pitfalls—the tendency to become academically arid or to lecture the reader while relying upon banal platitudes. Impressively, Hayes manages to avoid both of these—this is a genuinely engrossing story, wise but never sententious. Moreover, it is an inspiring one—the past can never be escaped, but that does not mean it must serve as a destiny.
A captivating novel, intellectually stimulating and literarily engrossing.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2024
ISBN: 9798991105200
Page Count: 418
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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