A tense mystery driven by maternal and wifely anxieties.
A secluded beach, luxurious villa, discreet servants, and bottomless margaritas ought to spell a week of paradise for Jenna Carlson, her family, and friends. Yet secret phone calls are just the first sign of trouble.
Vacationing in beautiful Puerto Vallarta to celebrate her husband Peter’s 50th birthday, Jenna is eager to have some time to relax with her teenage daughter, Clementine, and maybe finish her currently stalled YA novel. What with her bout of stage 1 breast cancer and Peter’s intense work masterminding the online ordering app for his startup, Boychick Bagels, it’s been a difficult year. The Carlsons are joined by Peter’s business partner, Solly Solomon, his second wife, Ingrid, their 5-year-old son, Ivan, and Malcolm, Solly’s 17-year-old son from his first marriage to Maureen, who was one of Jenna’s best friends until Solly dumped her. A bit intimidated by Ingrid’s youth and easy glamour, Jenna dreads having to deal with her trendy food obsessions and her weird son. Now that Ingrid has dropped jewelry designing for YA book writing, Jenna’s also afraid she’ll be forced to read Ingrid’s latest draft. When she’s not dodging Ingrid, Jenna is spying on Clementine, hoping to find clues in her texts to her boyfriend, Sean, as to how far their relationship has gone, and Jenna’s suspicions ratchet further up when Malcolm enters the picture. Reinhardt deftly manipulates the villa in paradise into a gothic labyrinth, and Jenna’s curiosity propels her into secrets perhaps best left alone. Why did Malcolm have to switch schools in his senior year? Who is Peter taking mysterious calls from at dinner? Is Solly having another affair? And who is the beautiful woman in the next villa?
A tense mystery driven by maternal and wifely anxieties.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55796-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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