An immersive family tale with a slightly retro feel.
A family’s long-simmering tensions boil over during a trip to the old homestead in this literary novel.
Sept. 25, 1945. In the town of Navsari, India, lies Truth Bungalow, the formerly stately home of the wealthy Sanjana family. The Sanjanas no longer live there, but on this particular day, the family finds itself back to visit the pet tiger who resides in one of the rooms. Dolly is the family matriarch: the widow of Kavas and current wife of his younger brother, Phiroze, who lost an arm in World War I. Dolly has two adult sons: Sohrab by her first husband and Rustom by her second. The half brothers (and cousins) are as different as night and day: Sohrab is fair and prickly, English-educated with an English wife, Daisy Holiday, while Rustom is dark and scarred by his service in the more recent World War. As they sit in the garden discussing the perennial tensions of India, the back story of each of the family members is slowly revealed. Like their country, the tale of the Sanjanas is one of rises, stumbles, and redefinitions; like many families, the story is one of parentage, resentment, and legacy. All the while, the pet tiger, Victoria, lurks nearby like the hand of fate itself—and she is quite a bit larger than she used to be. Desai’s prose is fluid and exact, sketching the complex spaces that his characters inhabit. Here, a teenage Daisy watches the king of England parade down the street from the shoulders of a stranger: “Daisy felt she lived in three worlds: first, in London; next, in the presence of the King; and finally on the shoulders of a strange man who bore her as easily as if she were a child. The procession moved slowly, but seemed over in an instant. Raised above the crowd she had imagined the King waved for her alone.” The book is written in a mannered style that evokes the time period, and while the plot goes certain places that readers will expect, the author provides some surprises as well. The result is a wide-lensed meditation on power dynamics—within countries and within families.
An immersive family tale with a slightly retro feel.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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