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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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