A charming story for those who enjoy a quick, action-packed, romantic fairy tale.
A quirky romantic novella about a reformed ex-con and the enterprising young woman who helps him rediscover his self-worth.
In her second full-length work of fiction (Wrong Place, Wrong Time, 2013), Jacobs tells a sweet tale of love and redemption. The book opens as Emet First confides to his employer, Eden Rose, that he has asked a woman on a date for the first time in almost a decade. The reader quickly learns that nine years earlier, Emet was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence in the Massachusetts correctional system. The narrator makes clear that despite his criminal record, Emet is a stand-up guy who simply fell victim to the accumulation of several unfortunate events. Unfortunately, Emet’s confidence has plummeted as a result of his prison time, and he needs Eden Rose to continually remind him of his self-worth. He worries that as soon as he reveals his past to Mercey Finch, his prospective date, she will run for the hills. With Eden Rose’s encouragement, Emet attempts to properly woo Mercey. It soon becomes apparent that she has some skeletons of her own, including a drug-addicted brother who seems determined to make trouble for his sister and anyone in her life. Emet realizes that he may be in a position to help Mercey and that perhaps he isn’t beyond personal salvation after all. The author manages to cram all of the book’s main action into a three-day period without overwhelming the plot or stalling the pace. Although the story takes place in Massachusetts, Jacobs includes very few details that ground the reader in a specific place and instead seems to purposefully create Anytown, USA. Through the inclusion of many whimsical and quirky details, like a homeless magician and his doting wife who act as taste testers for the cafe’s new desserts, Jacobs creates an enchanting world.
A charming story for those who enjoy a quick, action-packed, romantic fairy tale.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Linden Tree Press
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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