As long as you don’t get the idea that anyone’s going to change, you’ll be charmed.
Two women do the best they can with their aging parents, a couple of British academics retired to France.
Though the title sounds like a murder mystery, in this case it refers to a feeling Miranda reports to her sister, Charlotte, by email, during a visit to their parents’ home: “You know what it’s like: the usual desire to kill.” That’s the sisters’ consistent reaction to spending time with their crotchety, ailing, brilliant parents (and their llamas, Lollo and Leonora). The portraits of Dad and Mum, delivered in the first person by actress/playwright Miranda, are the highlights of playwright Barnes’ fiction debut, along with the ongoing banter volleyed among all the characters. The book also includes emails between the sisters, letters written in the 1960s to someone named Kitty by “Your Loving Sister,” and a small number of sections written in the third person covering developments Miranda is not privy to. The book delights in arcane family rituals, code names, and practices: “doing the ducks”; characters referred to as DK (Dog Killer) and HQ (Headquarters); an apparently fictional sibling named James; the horrors of a finally retired chest freezer named Boswell, which was moved to France from England along with all its contents; a host of shared literary references, from Epictetus to Kipling, Shakespeare to Stevie Smith. Mum’s impending hip replacement surgery, to be performed in Paris, is the closest thing the book has to a plot—it occasions a gathering of all five family members, including Miranda’s 19-year-old daughter, Alice, at the parents’ home, where a few remaining mysteries are cleared up. Higher stakes would not have been a bad idea; as it is, the reader waits for something to knock these characters out of their patterns of humoring and needling and misunderstanding each other and it just doesn’t come, making for a melancholy denouement.
As long as you don’t get the idea that anyone’s going to change, you’ll be charmed.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781668062838
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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