A family-in-crisis story that keenly captures deep-seated fears and regrets.
An overworked immigration lawyer and his religious mother work to finally face their pasts.
Haslett’s third novel is partly narrated by Peter Fischer, a New York City lawyer working for a nonprofit handling asylum cases. There, and in the rest of his life, he handles things with assurance but little joy—his lover, Cliff, has little more depth than a dating-app hookup, and he avoids conversations with his snarky and unfiltered sister, Liz. But he’s unsettled when he takes on the case of Vasel Marku, a young gay Albanian man seeking asylum over fears he’ll face homophobic persecution. Peter’s narration of his unusually deep involvement in Vasel’s case is braided around third-person narration about his mother, Ann, who leads a women-focused spiritual retreat in Vermont with her partner, Clare. Ann’s breakup with her husband (and Peter’s father) after falling for Clare disrupted her life, and it’s clear that both mother and son have been swallowing a lot of unspoken hurt. The strength of Haslett’s storytelling is its deliberation, slowly peeling back the veneers of Peter's and Ann’s professional accomplishments and cool public personas to reveal storms of guilt and fear. The two share complex queer sexual coming-of-age stories—Peter as a teenager falling for a handsome and emotionally distant classmate, Ann as a middle-aged woman falling for a woman, shipwrecking her marriage and career as a pastor. They share losses, too—Peter’s father’s death from cancer and a withheld event that gives the novel its emotional payoff. It’s “practically mandatory,” Clare observes, for women to “hide in other people’s pain,” just as men like Peter are asked to never feel it. And though the outlines of the novel suggest sentimental family-trauma fare, Haslett’s sophisticated grasp of the ways that people over-police their feelings makes it a remarkably acute and effective character study.
A family-in-crisis story that keenly captures deep-seated fears and regrets.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780316574716
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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