A moving and perceptive story about a man losing everything and finding a new life in Mexico.
In Brewer’s luminous novel, a vacationing couple in Mexico encounters much more than they expected.
Americans Bob and Kathy take a vacation in Mexico, seeing the sights and cavorting in the clear waters. Bob is an underwriter at Midland Mutual and Casualty Insurance Corporation (where Kathy is a secretary), and they use their time in Mexico as a refuge from the ugliness of Bob’s pending divorce from his wife, Carol. But that outside world interferes anyway when Bob learns that his divorce is going to gut him financially (“It’s the best deal you can possibly get,” he’s told). There’s low-key tension between Bob and Kathy—he constantly urges her to undertake tourist excursions as she tries to hold him back from his adventurous impulses—and as these conflicts grow more pronounced, Bob’s inner world begins to unravel as he starts to feel both desperately hopeless and strangely liberated. The quality of his thoughts changes, going from quotidian to cosmic: “Isn’t everyone a victim in the end, a sacrifice to sate the awful power that suffocates and drowns?” he wonders. “Who could escape it?” With judicious restraint, the author slowly and carefully conveys this personal change in Bob as the parti-colored oblivious world continues all around him. Key to his transformation is a 9-year-old boy named Tomcruise Chel Ochoa (his first name is the result of his mother, Dolores, christening him after the actor; his middle name is a reference to the Chel people, who are descendants of the Diving God, a figure from ancient Mayan mythology). Tomcruise wants Bob to teach him how to dive, and by steady measures, limned with deep sensitivity by Brewer, the boy draws Bob into his world and opens him to the possibility of a new life, “the chance to be better than he was and, for once, the chance to be of worth to someone—and to himself.” This story of personal reinvention is well crafted and often beautifully written, in the vein of Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene.
A moving and perceptive story about a man losing everything and finding a new life in Mexico.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2023
ISBN: 9798369405901
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Xlibris US
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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