This atmospheric first novel is an ode to friendship, creativity, and an era now gone.
A bittersweet love letter to 1990s New York.
Anyone who lived through the final decade of the last century in New York City will instantly recognize the world evoked by Kois, a longtime editor, in his debut novel. That goes double for young people raised in suburbs across the U.S. who moved to the city to work in publishing or the arts or for nonprofits. To be sure, that is a very specific readership slice. But those who fall into it may find themselves remembering—fondly or not, depending—their early 20s in a city that could be alienating, frightening, and diminishing but also intoxicatingly exciting. Kois focuses on the friendship between two young women, one a conscientious Midwesterner working in book publishing and subletting a sketchy apartment with a college friend, the other a free spirit who conceives of site-specific works around the city and lives in a squat. For unclear reasons, Kois has named both characters Emily. “If we were characters in a story,” one says to the other during an early encounter, “it would be pretty confusing that we were both named Emily.” Kois skirts confusion, to some degree, by identifying one Emily (the publishing one, who is the novel’s main character) as Em through much of the book. The somewhat nonlinear plot tracks Em’s maturation from a literary-agency assistant hanging out downtown in the early '90s to an established book editor raising a young daughter with her lawyer husband all the way uptown in the mid-2000s. Em’s rocky yet formative early friendship with Emily eventually peters out only to fire up again years later and again prompt change and growth. What’s best about Kois’ work here is not his novel’s low-stakes, episodic plot but rather his eye for detail and penchant for humorously trenchant descriptions: Em notes that Emily is wearing leather pants “that Em would never have been able to pull off, even if she could have pulled them on.” Such asides are amusing, but what does the Emilys’ story mean at a deeper level? It's hard to say, though this line, near the end, offers resonance: “Maybe we’re all frauds at twenty-five. But in our fraudulent selves we see the seeds of the artists we might become, if we can overcome our worst tendencies.” In the book’s final line, Em tells her daughter, “I’m always watching.” This keenly observed if imperfect book makes clear that Kois is, too.
This atmospheric first novel is an ode to friendship, creativity, and an era now gone.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-316-241-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
