An engaging, Steinbeckian look at climate change and its emotional costs.
A rural California family, struggling to make financial and emotional ends meet, faces the destructive threat of wildfires.
In the gold country of the California foothills, a place of picturesque natural beauty, residents know full well that conditions are always primed for a forest fire, that, in the words of Wallace Stegner—used here as an epigraph—the beautiful land ultimately “imposes itself” on them, and “sets the rules for [their] existence.” Briefly imprisoned a decade ago for growing medical marijuana, 65-year-old grape farmer Ben Hecht has been keeping a low profile, a little tired but grateful to have returned to his challenging yet rewarding farm life and to Ada, his novelist wife. Like early-evening sunlight streaming down the mountains, their world lately has been looking good, even promising. Their son, Yoel, has been painfully estranged from Ben, but now, back home after working in Los Angeles, seems surprisingly interested in reconciliation. Family and new friends surround them, proffering glasses of good wine or an occasional joint, just as they are surrounded by a happy menagerie of dogs, chickens, geese, and emus. There has even emerged the distinct possibility of Ben starting a wine-making business. Then, one day, a distant black plume of smoke changes everything. The wildfire that eventually tears through the area hurts the Hechts financially, but it is the obliteration of Ada’s work in progress that tips the family into a tailspin—this, and Yoel’s sudden involvement with an environmental group preparing to move from complaint to physical action, and Ben’s now-constant, justified worry of another, greater fire that would plunge them into poverty. Gumbiner examines the minutiae of the Hecht family’s life, their viniculture, their industry, their mellow California woods culture, sometimes to the detriment of narrative action, but his characters glow tenderly on the page. They are a good group of people to root for, at the shifting mercy of the winds that blow past their heads, trapped inside an ecosystem heating up steadily, past the point of hopeful disregard. Gumbiner crafts an important story, the fictional equivalent of outdoor warning sirens screaming above smoldering pine trees.
An engaging, Steinbeckian look at climate change and its emotional costs.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781662602429
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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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