A vivid, engrossing portrait of a family amid the turmoil of death and revelations.
In this debut novel, three estranged sisters must reconnect to receive their inheritance and uncover familial secrets.
Annie LeBlanc, the protagonist of Larivee’s story, is living a happily married existence in Berlin despite the encroaching catastrophe of climate change and a rush of pandemics. On an otherwise normal morning, she spots a ghost across the train platform. At first, she doesn’t recognize the apparition. But when she gets home, she looks inside an odd box that she recently received full of old photographs from her hometown in Maine, and realizes it was her grandmother. Annie soon finds out that her two sisters, Jeanne and Mary, received similar mysterious boxes, and that all three are being called back home to Maine. Their father—a reclusive, harsh, and successful novelist—has died, and they’re required to be present at the reading of his will. After an emotionally charged reunion, the sisters arrive in Maine to discover that their father was fabulously wealthy, and has left them his entire estate, so long as they agree to spend at least one month together in their childhood home. This would be strange enough, but it turns out that Mary is also seeing ghosts and Jeanne has been observing them since childhood. As the sisters come to grips with their newfound affluence, they discover that their parents’ ugly marriage was more complicated than it seemed, and that their father may have been their protector all along. While a surprise to the three women, these secrets are well known to a small sect of locals (including another celebrated author) who have their own motives regarding the sisters. Larivee’s novel is not short on pathos. Fortunately, she has skillfully drawn the relationships between the three women, each of whom readers will happily follow. Many of her details are rich with the authenticity of lived experience, such as the author’s rendering of Berlin in an era before cellphones, “where a counter on the phone let you know how much you were spending, click, click, click. The longer the distance, the faster the clicks.” Readers looking for groundbreaking prose may not find it here, but those in search of a deeply felt, highly plotted family narrative will be delighted.
A vivid, engrossing portrait of a family amid the turmoil of death and revelations.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798992207316
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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