Big-hearted exploration of the bittersweet pleasures of unrequited love.
Welsh teenager obsessed with pop star David Cassidy finally gets an opportunity to meet her idol, 24 years later than expected.
In 1974, with his bell-bottom catsuits, shaggy hair and come-hither green eyes, Partridge Family star David Cassidy is everything to awkward 13-year-old Petra Williams. She loves him with the near-hysterical devotion shared by many of her contemporaries. A smart girl, Petra gets little emotional support from her strict, German-born mother Greta. She prefers the house of her best friend Sharon, a boisterous, sweet-natured classmate who is almost as besotted with David as she is. Their world, with its emotional highs and lows, is little understood by adults, with one exception. Bill Finn is a young editor at The Essential David Cassidy Magazine. Not only does his work make him privy to the secret world of teenage girls, he actually is David, at least in print. His ghostwritten monthly “letters” from the star stir the fans, while embarrassing the author, who does not have the heart to even tell his girlfriend what he does. Like Petra, he is present at the singer’s notoriously crowded London “farewell” concert, during which 750 girls ended up needing medical treatment. After that, Petra starts to grow out of her infatuation, becoming an accomplished music therapist with a teenaged daughter of her own. But after separating from her husband, she goes through her late mother’s things and discovers something Greta had long kept from her. Back in the '70s, Petra had won a contest giving her the chance to meet David. Overcome with conflicting emotions, she tries to claim her prize, and lucks out when Bill Finn gets wind of her story. Now the successful (and single) head of a magazine group, he arranges a dream trip to Las Vegas for Petra and Sharon to finally meet the singer. He tags along, nursing a crush of his own. Witty and engaging, Pearson’s follow-up to the bestselling I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002) skillfully captures the overwrought emotions of youth, as well as their more subtle but no less ardent adult counterparts.
Big-hearted exploration of the bittersweet pleasures of unrequited love.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4235-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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