A story that focuses on the competition, love, and anger of sisterhood and the responsibilities of family.
A 29-year-old Manhattan chef who returns home to Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, when her restaurant-owner grandmother is in a car accident ends up staying for the summer.
Magnolia Adams’ grandmother Rose is her beacon: the light by which she sees the world. After years of prioritizing her own goals of being a chef and working in New York, trying to make her way in the restaurant world, all she has to show for it are a poorly paid job where she is not treated well and an on-again, off-again open relationship with co-worker Ronny. The one highlight is that she lives with her best friend from back home, Jim, an aspiring actor. When her grandmother is put into a medically induced coma after a car accident, Magnolia and Jim race back to South Carolina. Magnolia ends up staying for the summer to help her family—her mother, Lily, who struggles with alcoholism and broken dreams, and her sister, Violet, who's recently found out she's pregnant—and the family’s restaurant, the Magic Lantern, a neighborhood institution that was founded by her great-grandmother Daisy. Things are much more dire than she’d realized, and her mother’s boyfriend, Buster, has all but run the restaurant into the ground. The story follows the complicated relationship of Magnolia and Violet as they work through their respective relationship troubles—Magnolia with Ronny back in New York and Sam Smart in South Carolina, and Violet with her live-in boyfriend, Chris—and as the sisters move on to new things in their efforts to save the restaurant and support each other, their Gran, and their mother. Frank writes in a breezy style that often belies the anger and discontent below the surface of her story, and though her characters are fully formed, she gives them glossy surfaces that tend toward expected gender norms: The women are slim, beautiful, and well dressed, the men are tanned, toned, and quick to offer help.
A story that focuses on the competition, love, and anger of sisterhood and the responsibilities of family.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780063286153
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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