A raw and detailed selection of tales exploring human relationships.
Guerin’s collection of short stories navigates sex and emotional intimacy.
The author presents 17 vignettes exploring the varying forms of intimacy possible between two or more persons. While sex plays a role in all of the stories to some extent, the true focus is often on the emotional connections between characters. In “Loverless Love,” an orchestra’s marketing director falls for an often-manic marketing consultant, and they spend the bulk of their relationship merely sleeping next to one another without having sex. In “Talking to a Nude for Seven Days,” a man named Jeremy spends one week indulging in conversation (and the occasional foreplay) with a nude woman. The author’s prose is at its most evocative as Jeremy refuses to go further with the woman: “When we touch each other, it feels like stacking gold coins one on top of the other, right between my hips. If we made love, I’m afraid it would be like knocking them all down.” In the most poignant tale, “Avant-Garde,” a woman named Irma meets an artist named Ernst who offers her thousands of dollars to play the central part in his performance piece, “Secretariat.” In the piece, Irma must sit nude atop a stuffed horse and type nonstop. What makes “Avant-Garde” moving is Irma’s feeling of purpose within the spectacle. As she becomes famous (and as she and Ernst become lovers) she is reticent to do anything that could take her away from “Secretariat.” Even as interest in the piece declines and she grows older, Irma cedes everything to her role as the typist. The story plays with themes of fame, legacy, and sacrifice, most evident in the dichotomy between Irma’s feelings of fulfillment and her ultimate fate, mocked and left with nothing. Unfortunately, many of the female characters risk of veering into “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” territory, functioning more like exhibits that the male protagonists aim to interpret than fully realized characters. Despite this, these stories feel intimate and personal and make for a unique and engaging collection.
A raw and detailed selection of tales exploring human relationships.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781956872262
Page Count: 355
Publisher: Amika Press
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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