An exceedingly kooky protagonist drives this touching, silly adventure.
Keech presents a comedic novel about a blundering young professional.
Kevin Mallory, doesn’t have a lot going for him. He can’t hold a job for long, he is useless around a firearm, his dating prospects are bleak, and he certainly can’t cook. When the reader meets Kevin, he at least has his own efficiency apartment and people that want to get to know him. He works in the call center for a company called UniCast Cable and spends most of his day doing everything he can to not help customers. Although his poor performance verges on getting him fired, something makes him rethink his future. After developing an interest in his co-worker Nell, Kevin joins Nell’s beloved company “Cheer Committee,” but he still has a long way to go to melt her heart. Meanwhile, he strikes up a friendship with his neighbor Thomas, a budding track star who, unlike Kevin, comes from a stable and caring family. When Thomas winds up in trouble, Kevin wants to help him even if it requires him to make some unethical—if downright ludicrous—decisions. At the outset, Kevin can seem a little too fantastical even for such a free-wheeling story—he hates people who walk fast, owns a pet ferret for dubious reasons, and wears colored beads on his facial hair. Yet, as the story progresses, he manages to become someone worth rooting for. Even if he does, at one point, steal someone’s cat, he goes out of his way to care for the “beautiful” creature. And he is not without his hard-won realizations. After he takes to wearing a suit, he comes to realize, “an old, worn suit was worse than no suit at all.” So how will this individual who is “a lifelong avoider of consequences, a violator of common standards of decency” ever manage to grow? The narrative hits on some tough topics like police brutality, yet it maintains a fun tone throughout. Love or hate Kevin (and the reader may find themselves doing both at the same time), this quest for maturity becomes oddly endearing.
An exceedingly kooky protagonist drives this touching, silly adventure.Pub Date: April 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73559-384-5
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Real Nice Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 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
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BOOK REVIEW
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