An engaging and dramatic (if often depressing) journey through family strife.
Heinrich’s novel is a dark tale of family dysfunction and its consequences.
Mary Kline, the daughter of the owner of the town department store, has always been on the heavy side. A chubby child, she grows into an obese teenager, so large that her mother assumes the task of sewing her wardrobe so that, despite her size, she can have clothing in the latest styles and finest fabrics. Her parents cater to her whims and desires, providing everything but the one thing she truly needs: displays of love and affection. Mary is a misfit at high school. The guidance counselor, June Essex, asks her to befriend another young girl, Pearl Davis, who is new in town. Pearl is shy and has an intellectual disability. Her parents are deceased, so Pearl lives with her older brothers; she, too, is doomed to be an outcast in the high school jungle. During the summer after junior year, an older boy, James Pullman, the preacher’s son, notices Pearl’s lovely figure and he takes advantage of the girl. That fall, it becomes obvious that Pearl is pregnant. Mary describes what happens next: “James Pullman had finished his dirty work. It was time for the Klines to swoop in for a rescue that was just as sinister.” Worried that their ungainly daughter will never be able to create a family of her own, the Klines arrange to take in Pearl and raise her baby, Elizabeth, as their own. Both mother and child are placed in Mary’s care. Heinrich’s disturbing novel opens near the end of the story, with Mary Kline indulging in her two self-soothing obsessions: sewing and eating. Jumping back in time, the tale plays out in addictive alternating first-person chapters, individually narrated by a vivid collection of primary and pivotal secondary characters. Mary, who frequently refers to herself in the third person and by her full name when she speaks to Pearl and Elizabeth, is an original and compelling protagonist. She carries a painful secret that she has blocked from her memory, which is not revealed to readers until the novel’s closing chapters—an original sin that results in subsequent generations of dysfunction.
An engaging and dramatic (if often depressing) journey through family strife.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-89022-143-8
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Speaking Volumes
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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