By turns laugh-out-loud funny and weep-into-your-hanky heartbreaking, Rabbit’s story is a powerful catharsis.
Her cancer is back, and all the love, humor, and stubbornness in the world won’t save Rabbit Hayes this time.
When 40-year-old Mia Hayes was a little girl, Johnny Faye, her brother Davey’s friend, dubbed her “Rabbit” for the pigtails bunched on her head. The nickname stuck. Johnny was the lead singer in Davey’s band, the Kitchen Sink, and the love of Rabbit’s life. From Johnny’s defending Rabbit from school-age bullies through the rise and fall of Kitchen Sink—a fall perpetuated by Johnny’s terminal illness—theirs was a true and clear love. Now Rabbit faces her last days in hospice care as she approaches death from metastatic breast cancer. Surrounded by her raucous family and friends, Rabbit tries to rally. Jack, Rabbit’s father, is devastated not only that his youngest will die, but also that his wife, Molly, seems to have given up on Rabbit. Yet Molly rarely leaves her daughter's side. Davey returns to Dublin from America, mourning for his sister, but finds some comfort in playing a paternal role for his 12-year-old niece, Juliet, whose biological father disappeared well before Rabbit gave birth to her. Rabbit’s older sister, Grace, tries to buttress the family, and everyone descends upon Rabbit’s room, holding a rather hilarious wake before her death. Although the ties binding her to her family pull taut, it’s the memories of Johnny that beckon more strongly. In Rabbit’s dreams, the narrative slips back in time to tell the love story between Rabbit and Johnny. McPartlin (The Space Between Us, 2012, etc.) deftly balances Rabbit’s disappointment and her family’s grief with humor. She possesses impeccable timing, creating rhythms of conversation that can evoke the banter of screwball comedies as well as the mournful dirge of loss.
By turns laugh-out-loud funny and weep-into-your-hanky heartbreaking, Rabbit’s story is a powerful catharsis.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05824-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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