A rollicking if slapdash romp, with a poignant story about sisterhood at its core.
Three sisters, their clueless partners, their awful mother, and many festering secrets gather at a castle in Britain for a wedding.
Actually, the wedding seems to be canceled in the book’s prologue, as Sylvie Peacock dashes off a note to her intended, a well-built English book lover named Simon Rampling, informing him that she’s leaving, heading back to her adored job as a school librarian in Miami. Among the reasons: Ten years ago, her marriage to the school’s choir director ended in his untimely death, and she’s still not over it. But there’s something Sylvie doesn’t know about her husband’s demise that both of her older sisters, Cleo and Emma, have been keeping from her, something that won’t make a ton of sense when it finally comes out, but rigorous sense-making is not the strong point, or probably even the intention, of this novel. For example, middle sister Emma has supposedly been doing well working for a Mary Kay–type marketing company but has actually spent every penny in the family coffers including her husband’s retirement account—more than $24,000—on Sweet Nothings’ lingerie, lotions, lube, and sex toys. (Okay, he didn’t notice the bank statement, but what about all those vibrators?) While Emma is in England with husband Rich and sons Guinness and Jameson in tow, her debt, recorded at chapter openings, almost doubles, another thing not to think about too hard. Fortunately, Ward provides plenty of distractions: agendas, menus, British history lessons, disgusting-sounding medieval foods—“Cup of posset, my friend? It’s not so rancid once your taste buds adjust”—literary references, perfume formulas, and juicy sex scenes. Male characters don’t get into this book unless they know what a tongue is for (even Simon’s elderly father has a much younger girlfriend, though those specifics are left to our imaginations). The development of the relationships among Cleo, Emma, and Sylvie, who have not emerged from their childhoods unscathed but are each struggling toward authenticity and happiness, provides an emotional anchor for all the hoopla.
A rollicking if slapdash romp, with a poignant story about sisterhood at its core.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593500293
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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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