A thoroughly engaging, modern-day tale of self-discovery.
In Taylor’s debut novel, a series of dire events leads a New Yorker to reexamine her life.
Tori Rose could use a night out. The 29-year-old woman likes her job at Walker Art House, but not her churlish boss, and her estranged husband is spitefully dragging out their divorce proceedings. She heads to a club with her British best friend, Leslie, and one of Leslie’s friends. Things take a frightening turn when Tori, suddenly woozy, gets separated from the other two women; all three later realize they were drugged by strangers, and, by sheer luck, narrowly avoided the clutches of human traffickers. Tori, understandably shaken by this close call, takes a closer look at her past and present. She realizes that she’s always been a people pleaser; she lived with an abusive mother, spent too long in a bad marriage, and now puts up with her boss’ perpetual cruelty: “I can’t feel like a passenger in my own life,” she says. So she decides to take her life back—confronting those who have or continue to hurt her and accepting that she deserves better. Taylor presents a multilayered protagonist in Tori, a Black woman who endures others’ racism and sexism; it’s also revealed that she can hold her own in physical confrontations. Despite the title, the kidnapping attempt is but one of a series of absorbing subplots in which Tori faces tough obstacles. As such, many characters are unsavory, though a few are kind, including her gay “work husband” Paris and her friend Aaliyah, who offers sage advice over the phone. Taylor is a skilled writer who provides dialogue that pops as well as spirited descriptive passages, as when Tori, in a pre-dawn city, “nodded at the boys throwing stacks of newspaper from the back of a graffiti-laden truck and the group of crackheads stumbling to their den.”
A thoroughly engaging, modern-day tale of self-discovery.Pub Date: March 22, 2023
ISBN: 9798985532920
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2023
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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