A family must face its own secrets to deal with crisis in a well-crafted debut.
Shame and miscommunication drive wedges between loving siblings at turning points in their lives.
The Irish American family of the title runs a successful pub bearing their name in a small New York town. They’re close-knit, but most of them keep shameful secrets from each other. Father Mickey worries he has dementia (and has never talked about his past Irish Republican Army connections); oldest son Denny is stressed because he’s about to open a second pub for which he has borrowed a lot of money via sketchy methods and because his wife has moved out. His brothers, artistic Jackie and Shane, who’s intellectually disabled but a hardworking bundle of energy, are both haunted by the abrupt and mysterious departure to California five years ago of their sister, Sunday. Now she’s home, recuperating from a drunken car wreck but enigmatic as ever, which is really stressing out Denny’s best friend and business partner, Kale Collins, who is also Sunday’s former fiance. He might have moved on to marriage and fatherhood, but the torch he carries for Sunday is hot enough to burn down both their houses. Lange builds the plot by switching to a different character’s point of view in each chapter, giving the reader angles on events that are sometimes intriguingly different. The Brennan men, including Kale, who pretty much grew up with them, rally around Sunday when she’s threatened, although they do have a touch of toxic masculinity, tending to think of violent revenge as a solution, and sometimes acting on it. The Brennan matriarch, Maura, has been dead for several years when the story begins, but her influence plays a surprising role. The Brennans find redemption, but Lange doesn’t wrap things up too neatly—some of those old secrets have new echoes.
A family must face its own secrets to deal with crisis in a well-crafted debut.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-79622-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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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