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ALONE IN A CROWDED ROOM

AN ADOPTION STORY

A masterful adoption tale: heart-rending and life-affirming in equal measure.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2018

This debut fictional memoir features an adoptee who yearns for her biological mother.

Lexie Saunders is 5 years old when she discovers that she is adopted. The scene is a heartbreaking one. Before tucking Lexie into bed, her adoptive mother explains to her: “I picked you out of a nursery of babies.” After reasoning that she has been abandoned by her biological mother, the young girl asks, “Didn’t she love me?”—a question that her adoptive parent cannot answer. As Lexie falls asleep, she confides: “So began a lifetime of missing Mama. It was like living with a hole inside me.” The book opens at an unconventional moment—on Dec. 26, 1951—six weeks before Lexie’s birth. She narrates her birth mother’s story from inside the womb, explaining the reasons that the baby has to be given up for adoption. She recalls “Mama” being escorted to a “home for unwed mothers” by Lexie’s embarrassed grandmother. Lexie’s biological father, disparagingly called “Junior Sperm Donor,” is also described evading his responsibilities and declaring his intention to marry another girl. The narrative follows Lexie’s coming-of-age, the bonds and rifts with her adoptive family, and her escalating desire to fill the emotional hole inside herself by finding her biological mother. In this self-assured first novel, Bierkan is a powerfully evocative writer, and the way she depicts the bond between mother and unborn child is uncanny: “I breathed the lavender she dabbed behind each of her ears after a bath while she stroked my bottom nestled just behind her belly button.” This sense of safety is brutally juxtaposed with Lexie being “unceremoniously dropped into the arms of the first of many faceless strangers” after her birth and the scent of lavender growing “more and more faint.” In this poignant work filled with emptiness, loss, love, and hope, the prose is startlingly realistic, and readers will be forgiven for mistaking the book for nonfiction. The result is a deeply affecting story that may prove a source of comfort to those with similar adoption experiences.

A masterful adoption tale: heart-rending and life-affirming in equal measure.

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1292-9

Page Count: 286

Publisher: LifeRichPublishing

Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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THE PERFECT COUPLE

Sink into this book like a hot, scented bath...a delicious, relaxing pleasure. And a clever whodunit at the same time.

A wedding on Nantucket is canceled when the bride finds her maid of honor floating facedown in the Atlantic on the morning of the big day.

One of the supporting characters in Hilderbrand's (Winter Solstice, 2017, etc.) 21st Nantucket novel is Greer Garrison, the mother of the groom and a well-known novelist. Unfortunately, in addition to all the other hell about to break loose in Greer's life, she's gone off her game. Early in the book, a disappointed reader wonders if "the esteemed mystery writer, who is always named in the same breath as Sue Grafton and Louise Penny, is coasting now, in her middle age." In fact, Greer's latest manuscript is about to be rejected and sent back for a complete rewrite, with a deadline of two weeks. But wanna know who's most definitely not coasting? Elin Hilderbrand. Readers can open her latest with complete confidence that it will deliver everything we expect: terrific clothes and food, smart humor, fun plot, Nantucket atmosphere, connections to the characters of preceding novels, and warmth in relationships evoked so beautifully it gets you right there. Example: a tiny moment between the chief of police and his wife. It's very late in the book, and he still hasn't figured out what the hell happened to poor Merritt Monaco, the Instagram influencer and publicist for the Wildlife Conservation Society. Even though it's dinner time, he has to leave the "cold blue cans of Cisco beer in his fridge” and get back to work. " ‘I hate murder investigations,’ [his wife] says, lifting her face for a kiss. ‘But I love you.’ " You will feel that just as powerfully as you believe that Celeste Otis, the bride-to-be, would rather be anywhere on Earth than on the beautiful isle of Nantucket, marrying the handsome, kind, and utterly smitten Benji Winbury. In fact, she had a fully packed bag with her at the crack of dawn when she found her best friend's body.

Sink into this book like a hot, scented bath...a delicious, relaxing pleasure. And a clever whodunit at the same time.

Pub Date: June 19, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-37526-9

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018

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