Cece can’t remember a time before her mother, Carla Weathers, “became too weak to carry anything but tears”—Cece's memories...
Twenty-eight-year-old accounts manager Cece Weathers has spent her life taking care of her sick mother after her father, a traumatized Vietnam vet, abandoned them before she was born.
Cece can’t remember a time before her mother, Carla Weathers, “became too weak to carry anything but tears”—Cece's memories of her 1970s childhood are shadowed by the gray weight of her mother’s depression, which forced Cece to take on adult tasks such as laundry, groceries, and cleaning. But when social worker Tanya Boylin entered the picture, Cece excitedly began attending a school for gifted and talented students. Unfortunately, Cece was the “only caramel face in the row of vanilla crème” and was ostracized by her predominantly white classmates. She sought refuge in books—reading “seventh grade chapter books” by fourth grade. It wasn't until Carla’s state-ordered therapy sessions also ushered in piano lessons for Cece as a form of day care that Cece made her first friend her own age, Pam. Cece’s friendship with Pam and Rocky, her first crush, sustained her during four traumatic years of high school bullying followed by the horrors of job applications and workplace politics. And when another friend, Doris, an octogenarian dying of cancer, gives Cece a house, Cece is faced with deciding if, for the first time, she will be able to live apart from her co-dependent mother and build a life of her own. Shifting between past and present, Kelly (Call It Forth: Poems, Stories & Columns, 2014) deftly weaves a narrative extending from Carla’s college days during the civil rights movement through Cece’s girlhood and present adulthood. But it's Cece’s vibrant, personable voice that carries us through the novel. A multilayered exploration of the intricate nature of family ties in defining who we are—and how, ultimately, we can choose who we want to become.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-940430-48-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Curbside Splendor
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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