An engaging novel that hooks readers in with a fast-paced story of forbidden love.
In Callahan’s novel, a 39-year-old woman tries to figure out her place in her husband’s family.
In 2018, as the story opens, April Simone and her two children travel from Upstate New York to her father-in-law’s house in Massachusetts on Cape Cod for a family reunion. There, she’s met by her husband, Al, a sportswriter, and an old flame—her brother-in-law, Oliver. She and Oliver have found ways to exist in each other’s presence since she married Al, who is the only family member aware of his wife and his brother’s romantic history: “Aside from holidays, their annual Cape Cod reunions were the only time April laid eyes on Oliver, each vacation a year farther from the man she was with in Ireland.” However, the week that follows brings up old questions about what she really wants and deserves. Al is an alcoholic and philanderer who, despite his flaws, truly loves April. Oliver is an accomplished musician who appears, at first, to be in a happy marriage. The story jumps back and forth in time to tell tales of a troubled youth, the aforementioned trip to Ireland, a love letter, and April and Al’s convenient wedding. For April, being with Oliver would mean breaking up a family that includes her beloved adopted niece, Phoebe. However, staying with Al means humiliation. Meanwhile, her adolescent children are also finding out more about themselves as they come of age in a family whose sense of peace is rocky at best. Many passages in Callahan’s novel read as if they were first written as a play, as the narrative drifts from room to room in the single Cape Cod house with a strong emphasis on dialogue; as a result, although the book is on the lengthy side, it proceeds at a fairly quick pace. The story falls into tropes of family-centered dramas that many readers will find familiar, but its treatment of issues such as infidelity has enough nuance to catch and keep the reader’s attention until the end. Overall, the novel’s straightforwardly dramatic aspects, and its clear sense of forward momentum, give it the feel of a diverting beach or vacation read.
An engaging novel that hooks readers in with a fast-paced story of forbidden love.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781662517570
Page Count: 331
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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