An often moving novel hampered by a tendency toward overwriting.
In Dean’s generational saga, two Missouri families become locked in a deadly feud.
It’s 1973, and Walker Scofield seems bewildered by the falling fortunes of his once-successful clan. The considerable land they once owned in Missouri is now gone, and his son, Merle, is an alcoholic who shows no signs of changing his ways. Walker can’t help but dolefully ask himself,“How had it all gone wrong?” Then Merle’s son, Troy, murders local Bobby Lee Phelps and burns his house down in retribution for taking up with his flirtatious wife, Alisha. Troy is sent to jail, but when he gets out,Alisha leaves town, terrified that he’ll hunt her down and continue his mission of vengeance. She moves in with John Wrenwood, an insurance salesman; however, she’s eventually disappointed when Troy doesn’t come looking for her, and she even feels a strange desire to return to him. Meanwhile, Raelyn Phelps, Bobby Lee’s teenage niece, runs away from home; she’s tired of feeling taken for granted by her parents, who treat her like a servant and routinely beat her. She doesn’t manage to make it very far from home, though, and ends up living with Troy, whom she fears but also finds ruggedly handsome; she also doesn’t care that he killed Bobby Lee, “since she had never particularly liked her uncle.” Word of their relationship travels quickly, setting the stage for a brutal reprisal from the Phelps family, who believe that Troy still hasn’t atoned for his crimes.
In the best parts of this novel, Dean writes with great restraint and intelligence, effectively depicting the downward spiral of the two families and engagingly showing how their grim destinies are intertwined. They all live amid the ruins of their collective descent, and Fairmont, Missouri, is vividly portrayed as a forlorn site of former promise. Furthermore, the author has a notable talent for creating atmosphere; a kind of sad predestination hangs above the Phelpses and Scofields like a darkened storm cloud, just waiting to finally burst. However, Dean’s prose style swings from poetically poignant to gratuitously overwrought, as when the narration notes that “Time had moved at a hectic pace, passing in a variegated rhythm under the malefic sun, and blurring under a series of red moons stretching over decades as time had plodded inexorably forward in a fog of partial recollections.” Another passage uses the term “Beowulfian” as an adjective, which is as pretentious as it is unclear. In addition, the book seems overpopulated with characters and subplots that are likely to ultimately overwhelm the reader. In short, the work sometimes feels as if it’s straining too much for literary heights. That said, the plot at the center of the novel, focusing on the decline and mutual acrimony of the two clans, is elegiacally sad, and many readers will find this to be a darkly enchanting novel—one that transports them to a world filled with despair but not quite empty of hope.
An often moving novel hampered by a tendency toward overwriting.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 979-8487371959
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Cowboy Jamboree Press
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2022
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
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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