A deeply felt work that shows the magical alchemy of art.
Two parents, a writer and photographer, separately grieve for their daughter in Perly’s sequel novel.
Death Valley(2017) introduced readers to war photographer Vivienne Pink, who went to the Las Vegas desert on an assignment to photograph servicemen with her husband, a novelist named Johnny Coma. (Their original names are Vivienne Pinsky and Jonathon Comasky.) Secret atom bomb tests in the area have left Vivienne with side effects that include a bald scalp. In 2004, the couple’s daughter, Stella, was killed near their Toronto home by a hit-and-run bicyclist; now, in 2016, Vivienne and Johnny are estranged. He’s living in a tiny Barcelona apartment, where he quixotically writes letters to Stella and commits them to the ocean, believing that this will return her to him—which it does, in the form of a talking octopus. Meanwhile, Vivienne has come to Amsterdam, hoping to capture images of a rumored terrorist attack and revisiting her favorite paintings in the city. She also strikes erotic sparks with Alexi Green, a charismatic and mysterious man who seems to know all about her. In their different ways, father and mother reconcile themselves with ghosts of the past. In her third novel, Perly writes in a magical realist vein that is often mediated by vivid images linked to local qualities of light and water in the Netherlands (“Pale silver-green, an Amsterdam sky reflecting its own cold canal water”) and Spain (“The Mediterranean sky was lemon and citron and pink and so humid”).For both Johnny and Vivienne, making and responding to art is revealed to be central to their fully engaging with their daughter’s death: Johnny immerses himself in the work of Miguel de Cervantes; Vivienne visits her two favorite paintings in the Rijksmuseum as if they’re old friends. Both characters’ experiences are intriguing, poignant, and passionate—even if they sometimes exist on such a rarefied plane that they seem otherworldly.
A deeply felt work that shows the magical alchemy of art.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-92-808896-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Buckrider Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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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