Deft plotting is undermined by overdone description in this hockey-heavy domestic drama.
Two divorced people with tragic secrets try to find their way back to each other, with an assist from hockey.
Casey and Kyle McCray’s marriage seemed like storybook material. They began as childhood friends in Potsdam, New York, moved on to a teenage romance, and married young. For 21 years, they saw themselves as a solid team. But as this novel opens, they’re on opposite ends of the country—Kyle has fled all the way to Spokane, where he’s working as a mechanic—and scarred by a bitter divorce two years earlier. When Kyle learns that his father, Danny, a retired firefighter, has suffered a stroke, he reluctantly goes home to help care for him. Kyle knows he can’t avoid seeing Casey—she’s Danny’s neighbor and main caretaker. At first the two keep their distance, but soon, Casey, a middle school teacher who helps run the hockey team, turns to Kyle for help coaching the kids. He was a high school hockey star, and the game was always a bond in their relationship. Even more than the present tension between them, the plot is driven by the slow, skillful revelation of what shattered their marriage in the first place. Unfortunately, the story gets bogged down in snowbanks of extraneous description—everything from the outfits and hairstyles of minor characters to the color of a dog’s license tag, not to mention an avalanche of middle school hockey minutiae. The novel delves into the limitations of small-town lives set on their tracks early, such as that of Casey’s brother, Wyatt. Seriously injured as a child in the car crash that killed their father, he uses a wheelchair and has forged a career doing custom woodwork. Even though he longs to move to a city, he still lives with his sister, an arrangement that’s held him back more than protected him. The unfolding of Casey and Kyle’s secrets keeps the story interesting, although an anti-feminist subtext that emerges may disturb some readers.
Deft plotting is undermined by overdone description in this hockey-heavy domestic drama.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328434
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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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