The texture of family life as it unravels, then begins to regenerate, is conveyed with unflinching clarity and redemptive...
Two eighth-graders witness an armed robbery in a sandwich shop. One is taken, the other left behind—making her a very lucky, very troubled girl.
It must be because Lisa Bellow weighs 15 pounds less and is hotter than her: that's one of Meredith Oliver's thoughts as she tries to understand what happened at the Deli Barn, where she stopped for a root beer after a particularly trying algebra class and ended up witnessing the kidnapping of her middle school’s No. 1 mean girl. Meredith’s nonabduction befalls the Oliver family less than a year after another out-of-the-blue trauma—her brother, a high school baseball star, had his left eye and socket completely crushed by a foul ball. We track the family’s attempt to cope with these misfortunes through the alternating perspectives of Meredith and her mother, Claire. Overwhelmed by her parents’ solicitousness—“Her father was a flashing yellow light in the middle of the kitchen; her mother’s smile looked like she’d drawn it on her face after consulting an illustrated encyclopedia of expressions”—Meredith slips further and further away, her concern with Lisa’s disappearance becoming obsessional, which Perabo (Why They Run the Way They Do, 2016, etc.) conveys using a daring and suspenseful narrative strategy. Claire Oliver, who shares a dental practice with her good-natured, unfailingly kind husband, Mark, is as fine a fictional character as we have encountered in some time, dark, moody, passionate about her children, keenly self-aware, and very, very funny. Contemplating her own mother’s long-ago death, for example, she thinks, “God…death was complicated. And exhausting. And apparently it just kept on being complicated and exhausting forever, probably until you yourself died and became an exhausting complication someone else had to constantly negotiate.” You will hate to leave the inside of this woman’s head when you finish the book.
The texture of family life as it unravels, then begins to regenerate, is conveyed with unflinching clarity and redemptive good humor.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6146-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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