A vulnerable, cleareyed portrait of humanity that could benefit from a wider scope.
Watts blends nostalgia and emotional honesty in these true-to-life poems.
Family is the focus of these poems as Watts spins ordinary moments into colorful tapestries. The author opens with “Snake I” and “Snake II,” recalling a grandmother, Ruth, who spent her entire life in a cabin in Elk Mountain and once treated the speaker’s snake bite. Watts captures gritty characters in stunning detail throughout the book. In “Ester,” the speaker remembers Uncle Ike, a relative bedridden from a coal-mining accident, and Aunt Ester, who gave the speaker old-fashioned trinkets. A complicated, ill fatherly figure appears in multiple poems. In “Dad II,” the speaker’s father tells a doctor through “lying lips” that he did not fall, then derides the medical profession. After her father dies from heart failure, the speaker suspects the prepaid crematorium scammed the deceased in “Dad III.” “Mrs. W” details a provocative neighbor who wears miniskirts, belly-baring tops, and bloodstained clothes. “Townsfolk” introduces readers to the local baker, grocer, and shoe seller, all exhibiting kindness in their own ways. The speaker reminisces about a long-gone bowling alley in “Hank,” named after its unusual maintenance man. An adult speaker with a heart condition wonders about the private life of her “Cardiologist” while signing surgery consent forms with trembling hands in “Surgeon.” “Artificial Intelligence” cloyingly considers all the things AI can’t do, like “savor / the warmth of a lap cat / gentle toll of distant bell / smell of home.” Watts’ striking poems are at once intimate and universal. Her characters come to life in evocative details, like the way Uncle Ike’s cough made “a clang like a peach pit / shot into a tuba’s throat.” Sensory-engaging descriptions limn how a screen door “whines, thuds shut” or snow boots “punch holes / through the ice-crusted sidewalks.” The bittersweet, insightful “Mothers” juxtaposes young moms’ woes (e.g., pregnancy weight) with an older, wiser speaker’s laments: “How useless / the fat / I carry around / on my hips / feels with no one / to prop there.” A quibble—the book seemingly catapults from childhood to late adulthood with little attention to the midlife experience.
A vulnerable, cleareyed portrait of humanity that could benefit from a wider scope.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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