A quick read that packs in lots of heart and familial love.
Three sisters tackle questions of love, heartbreak, and forgiveness over the course of one summer in Dembowski’s novel.
Liz Madden thought she had a love story straight out of the movies with Julian, her husband and erstwhile childhood sweetheart. But when she discovers his affair after the letdown of a negative pregnancy test, she’s forced to confront all the not-so-perfect details of their relationship—starting with their rocky road to marriage, which included dozens of breakups and makeups. Liz isn’t so keen to take Julian back this time and goes to stay with her father and half-sister, Zoey, who she catches in bed with Andrew, Zoey’s cheating ex-boyfriend; Liz’s return might shake the last bit of Zoey’s faith in first love. The arrival of their older sister, Cecilia, complicates things even further, as she still has not forgiven their father for cheating on their mother years earlier, or cultivated a sisterly relationship with Zoey, who is the product of that marriage-ending affair. Cecilia also struggles with commitment issues that bar her from taking the next step with her girlfriend. As the days of summer pass by, the sisters find themselves relating to each other more than ever, especially recently heartbroken Liz and Zoey. Together, they forge new connections and discard old ones as Cecilia wonders if it’s time to finally accept Zoey as a part of her family after years of using Liz as a go-between. Told in alternating perspectives, the three storylines are braided together with ease, effectively conveying the overarching themes and character arcs. The prose drills deep into the sisters’ heads and depicts their emotions in affecting detail: “I sit down on the bed and stare at my hands in my lap. My heart thumps a broken beat. Whatever any of this means, I can’t think about it now. Or ever.” Their individual journeys feel real, with endings that don’t come with a neat bow on them but are still satisfying.
A quick read that packs in lots of heart and familial love.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781958231562
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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