In Apartment 2B, the walls do talk, and their tales reveal their tenants’ minds and hearts.
One apartment on Miami Beach becomes a microcosm of seven decades of ordinary, extraordinary lives.
Apartment 2B in an art deco building called the Helena on South Miami Beach serves as setting for all of the chapters of this moving, lyrical novel in short stories. New in 1942, it first houses a young military couple from Texas: Sophie and Jack Appleton. She’s giddy to find herself in such a glamorous town, but he’s preoccupied with the war, a war that will soon enough come home to them. In 1963, an aging Cuban concert pianist named Eugenio Francisco Montes Behar grieves for a lost love and finds the man’s spirit in music. In 1972, the tenant is Sandman, a refugee in his own country, a divorced Vietnam vet with PTSD who’s badly undone by an anti-war march, then saved by hatchling sea turtles. In 1982, Isabel is a lovely 18-year-old Marielita disappointed in South Beach at the nadir of its decay but dazzled by the older painter who installs her in the apartment first as muse, then as lover. In 2002, married couple Maribel Rodriguez and Ignacio Salas live there with his girlfriend, Beatrice Dumonts—a complicated threesome created not by love or desire but by immigration law. In 2010, Pilar, a Cuban American journalist, is packing to leave 2B (now a condo) after she loses her job and faces the bitter reality of moving back in with her parents at age 40. Pilar rents her condo to a young man named Lenin García, another Cuban refugee, who soon dies. The last and longest section, set in 2012, weaves Lenin’s heartbreaking story together with that of Lana, another immigrant who’s not who she seems to be. She tries to isolate herself but becomes engulfed in all of the extraordinary stories that haunt the Helena, including those of the living. Vividly drawn characters and finely crafted prose enhance these interwoven tales.
In Apartment 2B, the walls do talk, and their tales reveal their tenants’ minds and hearts.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781640095830
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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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