An engaging set of stories of broken lives, jagged in structure but smooth in the telling.
A variety of lives hit the skids in dramatic and usually self-inflicted ways in this linked story collection.
Though billed as a novel, Petersen’s debut more closely resembles a disjointed Pulp Fiction–style narrative, hopscotching west of the Mississippi with a motley set of characters. In the opening chapter, a man is speeding through Arizona to get to his father’s wedding when he strikes a dog on the highway, and in short order he’s pursuing a fling with its owner. Cut to a story narrated by the son of a friend of the groom, recalling the perils of buying a home without a real estate agent. Cut then to a story about the angst-ridden former owner of the house and his brother, whose wife is having an affair with a reality TV star. And so on: The connections between the characters are often tenuous (though Petersen ties a bow at the end), but they’re all grown-ups who make rash, immature attempts to reboot their lives and pay the price for it. “I wanted to find a different path,” says the ill-fated home buyer, though he could be speaking for everybody populating this book. “I wanted to buck the system. That was all me.” Petersen usually delivers the stories in the first person, with narrators recalling their personal-life own goals with sardonic humor or barely contained fury. But the penultimate story, “Providence,” is a gem told in the third person, involving Eric, a deaf teenager attempting to rise above his trailer-park upbringing and sour memories of his mother’s death by delivering chemicals for meth labs throughout rural Oklahoma. Like everybody else here, he’s a victim of his own bad decisions, but Petersen so carefully and compassionately arrays the forces in his life (dead mom, remorseful dad, a conspicuous disability) that every easy assumption gets repelled.
An engaging set of stories of broken lives, jagged in structure but smooth in the telling.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-065-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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