A tender, heartbreaking, and exceptionally intelligent study of contemporary motherhood in all its complexity.
In Yearwood’s novel, two women’s lives are changed by very different experiences of motherhood.
Rebecca and her husband—both distinguished professors at the University of Pennsylvania—live a life of elegant dinner parties thrown in their three-story Victorian home, but something is missing: a child. While staring at the condoms Will insists on using (meant for “prom nights…not for a woman in her late thirties,” she thinks bitterly), Rebecca decides to leave Will and become a parent on her own. As Rebecca researches designer sperm and adoption, across town, a young pregnant woman named Brittney is struggling to raise her two toddlers. After her irresponsible husband leaves her, Brittney is plunged into a nightmarish world of childcare woes, dead-end jobs, and a schedule so punishing she can’t find time to do the dishes. No matter how hard Brittney tries, it becomes clear—especially to theDepartment of Human Services—that she will not be able to raise her three children on her own. At the same time, Rebecca decides to pursue foster care as a way for an “older, single” woman to care for a child. Soon, these two very different women find their lives intersecting over the fate of Brittney’s three children as they are forced to confront their perceptions of one another and what it means to be a mother. Yearwood’s gift for characterization has readers rooting for both Rebecca and Brittney from the moments they are introduced. When the novel’s structure turns them against one another, situating them on opposing sides of a cold bureaucracy, it’s more than a clever twist—it’s a gut-wrenching experience. “You can’t just buy my children,” Britney thinks when she meets Rebecca for the first time in one of the story’s many well-observed instances in which economic tensions bubble under the surface (Brittney can barely get to the hospital to give birth while Rebecca quickly resolves the baby’s crying with a visit to a competent but expensive pediatrician). Through even the saddest and most difficult passages, Yearwood’s dry wit and literary style will keep readers engrossed, fascinated by the complex, beautiful women she has created.
A tender, heartbreaking, and exceptionally intelligent study of contemporary motherhood in all its complexity.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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