A cozy, conversational read featuring a lovably neurotic heroine.
In Schnall’s debut novel, shocking news derails a woman’s plans for her 40th birthday and prompts a journey of self-discovery.
As she prepares to send her youngest child off to school, stay-at-home mom Grace May dreams of filling her free time writing for Westchester Weekly magazine and rekindling her relationship with her husband, Darren. Unfortunately, the magazine shuts down before she pens her first column, and Darren makes a tearful confession that he cheated on Grace with a cocktail waitress. At first, Grace’s situation doesn’t seem to justify her panic: She doesn’t need to work, and her appropriately sheepish husband seems willing to wine and dine his way back into her good graces. But this isn’t enough to stop Grace from feeling sorry for herself or from holding a grudge against Darren. The real source of her discomfort becomes clear as she explains her wavering emotions and self-critical thoughts in long stretches of dialogue with her best friend, Cameron, who’s having fertility problems, and her mother and sister, whose relationships with Grace can’t fill the void left by her other sister’s death. “I’m so conflicted about whether I’m supposed to have a job or whether I’m supposed to be home with the boys,” Grace laments. Her mother replies, “You’re concerned with what you’re supposed to do, instead of doing what you want to do,” and she cites how Grace took ballet classes as a child because her teacher complimented her—not because she liked them. The author’s blend of girl talk and self-help wisdom reads like a conversation overheard at Starbucks: It’s written in a friendly, nonjudgmental voice that any woman would want to hear after a bad day. Just as Grace is ready to forgive Darren, a reunion with her high school crush threatens their marriage once again, and Cameron announces a shocking revelation of her own. Faced with real-world problems, Grace adjusts her priorities, confronts her fears, and in the process of being true to herself, learns the real meaning of the word “grace.”
A cozy, conversational read featuring a lovably neurotic heroine.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-940716-13-8
Page Count: 274
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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