An amusing, zigzagging adventure starring an unlikely hero with a plethora of issues big and small.
McKean’s comedic novel follows a divorced father in western Pennsylvania.
Peter Sanguedolce’s ex-wife, Avis, is a tough-minded attorney. When issues come up regarding the custody of their daughter, Jeanette, he does not have a lot of sway. A good-natured slacker, Peter inherited a family business that manufactured clay piping. This business subsequently failed. Peter now tends to spend his days overeating and vaguely considering reentering the business world. When his neighbor Jacob Weiner is put into a nursing home, he develops a friendship with the cantankerous old man. Jacob was the “chairman emeritus of the Oak Grove Music School Woodwinds Department,” and, though skilled with a clarinet, he was not (according to his daughter) the most able parent. Despite Peter’s general lack of direction (at one point he takes up baking), he has some pressing issues: Avis wants to send Jeanette away to boarding school in Connecticut. This does not seem to be the best fit for Jeanette, and Peter is suspicious of both Avis and her new husband, a budding politician named Elliott Fields. Meanwhile, Peter develops a relationship with Fay Halbrunner, the woman who bought Jacob’s former home. Fay insists that she and Peter try to help Jacob reengage with life. A road trip ensues in Peter’s 1988 Cadillac Brougham. It is not the last time in the narrative he will hit the road, journeying into the unknown with good (though misguided) intentions.
The plot features multiple twists and turns: Just as it seems that the situation with Avis is resolved and that the self-assured attorney has no more use for her ex-husband, cracks appear in her relationship with Elliott. When Fay has secured Peter’s interest, she suddenly finds that she has other business to attend to. These developments hold the reader’s interest as Peter eats (and drives) his way through his problems. Many of the motivations of the characters amount to very inconsequential, mundane issues; the nagging concerns over where to send Jeanette to school aren’t particularly funny or insightful. Even as the reader discovers the real reason Avis is so keen to send their daughter away, it does not make up for previous bland conversations on the subject. When an admissions director at a school asks Peter, “What makes you think that we’re the right one for Jeanette?” his response is as dull as the question. By contrast, Elliott, the obvious villain from the start, garners much greater intrigue: What exactly is this guy after? Why is he such a jerk? How will Peter manage to outfox the wily aspiring district attorney? This aspect of the story, along with comical lines, such as when Peter complains about construction workers blasting their radios (“Does each man have his own Rush Limbaugh?”), keeps it in motion, long after the Cadillac Brougham meets its own unhappy demise.
Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781604893410
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 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
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
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