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WHEN WE GROW UP

A delayed coming-of-age story that’s both perceptive and absorbing.

Six friends travel to Hawaii to celebrate their 30th birthdays and, after dodging imminent death, spend their time together drinking, bickering, reaching for one another, and investigating their years of interconnection.

Clare, Kyle, Renzo, Mac, Jessie, and Liam have known one another since seventh grade in L.A. They’ve fallen in and out of friendship and love with one another and have emerged as a (sometimes begrudgingly) inseparable unit. On this particular reunion in January 2018, they’ve gathered in Kyle’s parents’ second home on the island of Kaua‘i, planning to spend the week in full-on vacation mode. Then comes an emergency text advisory: “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawai‘i…This is not a drill.” After a few pages of watching the characters panic, we learn that the message was human error. The group feels its aftershocks long after that morning, though, and the anxiety it sows feeds the interpersonal reckonings that follow. Much of the richness in this novel is found in the conversations among the friends, which extend from their shared history and personal lives to politics, race, and class. Hawaii is a fitting backdrop for the more political conversations, but the relationship between the group and the land is not as fully fleshed-out as the friends’ grudges and crushes. The main protagonist, Clare, spends much of the book reminiscing on years past and chewing over her writing career, marriage to her college sweetheart, and relationship with each member of the group. Baker beautifully expresses the pressures of growing older while not feeling older, as well as the comfort of being with people who knew you as an adolescent—when you were unformed and naive, as you might still feel from time to time. “When you’ve known people this long,” Clare thinks, “when you knew them in middle school, knew their mothers and their childhood bedrooms, you can always see the ghosts at their shoulders.”

A delayed coming-of-age story that’s both perceptive and absorbing.

Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025

ISBN: 9781250345776

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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THE WEDDING PEOPLE

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

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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

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