An ambitious, moving saga that connects the personal and the global, illustrating how a youthful friendship can have tender,...
Frisch offers a debut novel about best friends growing up on an island near Tahiti who experience tragedies connected to local radioactivity.
Teenage friends Ari and Natua’s beautiful South Pacific homeland in French Polynesia was used as a nuclear testing site by the French government from the 1960s to the ’90s. Natua’s single mother, Angela, has serious health issues and is trying to keep the family hotel running so that it remains a viable tourist option. All their lives become more complicated when Ari is diagnosed with myeloma, which may be related to fallout from the nuclear testing years before. Her activist father, Manu, is trying to force France to declassify documents that would support his efforts to have the radioactive waste safely cleaned up. Manu runs into many political obstacles but fights on, although his greatest concern is his daughter’s health. Everyone is haunted by their pasts: Ari and Manu are both racked by grief over Ari’s brother Henri’s death in a plane accident; Natua wants to meet his biological father; and that father and Natua’s mother have secrets that will affect the futures of all the characters. Over the course of this novel, Frisch delivers a braided story of home and family that features complex and evolving but navigable relationships. The story moves through time with ease—Ari and Natua start the story as 14-year-olds and later reach young adulthood, island hopping to find medical care and the answers to family secrets. The major players, who include Angela, are lovingly and authentically realized as the narrative goes on, and Frisch integrates ideas of caretaking—watching out for one’s friends, one’s family, one’s home, and the planet in general—with serious, emotionally resonant life-and-death subject matter.
An ambitious, moving saga that connects the personal and the global, illustrating how a youthful friendship can have tender, lasting effects.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 979-8987742105
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Bombus Books
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
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BOOK REVIEW
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