What starts as a bitter internal dialogue becomes a rich overlap of the personal and the political.
This tightly wound novel follows a terminally ill woman on a quest to take vengeance against her long-absent father.
Hester, a corporate attorney in Manhattan, prides herself on her lack of emotional needs and connections, although she does like sex with strangers if they’re creepy enough. On the verge of turning 40, she discovers she has aggressive breast cancer and will die in six months unless she gets treatment. Instead, she quits her job and begins a cross-country drive to the California home of her father, an artist whom she last saw when she was 18, shortly after her mother’s death. Cancer aside, Hester is an emotionally damaged character, almost cringeworthy in her alienation from normal human feelings. Drawn with knife-sharp prose, she is a woman choosing to close herself off. Her travel plan is simple: “Drive west, find Dad, kill Dad, then self.” She claims that she’s wanted to kill her father since her parents’ divorce when she was 13. There’s a history of violence involved that Hester never allows to come fully into focus. Of course, her plans go awry in small and large ways. When her car is stolen, she can afford a rental; when visiting people from her past proves unnerving, she can escape. But what ultimately succeeds in throwing Hester’s equilibrium off balance is the bond she forms with a hitchhiker. John is an activist whose cause is “the dying world,” and Hester begins taking detours so he can photograph Superfund sites while fending off brushes with the law. Still in his early 20s, John is an idealistic extremist but also a character of profound integrity who cares deeply about both issues and people. Without being sexual, Hester and John’s relationship changes Hester—and the novel—for the better, weakening her self-protective solipsism while broadening her outlook to consider the world beyond her problems.
What starts as a bitter internal dialogue becomes a rich overlap of the personal and the political.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781250360885
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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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