A big-hearted novel about parenthood in a pandemic.
In Rothman’s debut novel, a father goes to the ends of the earth to save his son from Covid-19.
In early April 2020, the world has changed a lot over the last month. Covid-19 has descended upon New York with a fury, a fact that no one knows better than Andrew Gruber. He’s the assistant director of a funeral home in Jackson Heights, Queens, which is currently the “epicenter of the epicenter” of the pandemic. Things were grim enough when it was just Andrew’s neighbors getting sick, but now his severely asthmatic son, Miro, has tested positive for the disease (his 85-year-old parents might have it, too). After exhausting the powers of modern scientific medicine—the doctor’s advice is simply to wait and see—Andrew visits Lelya Dorche, a Roma witch doctor who works out of an abandoned post office in Coney Island. “Helped save my grandfather from polio when he was a kid,” Andrew’s best friend, Cleon Jones, assures him. “That lady should get the Nobel Prize for Medicine.” However, Lelya will only help Andrew if he agrees to travel to his wife’s native Bulgaria to procure twenty liters of rare Macedonian pine sap. How exactly will Andrew do that when every flight to Europe is grounded? If he wants to save his family, he’ll have to figure it out quickly. Rothman captures the sense of panic and desperation that characterized the first few months of the pandemic, when parents would make any conceivable sacrifice, however incredible, to protect their child. The tone is a mix of breathless urgency and absurd comedy, as when Andrew is given a hen to take with him on an illegal biplane flight: “They forgot to give us food for the bird!” complains his pilot. “How often do they eat?” Some readers may not be ready for a Covid-19 novel, but Rothman does an excellent job reminding us of the human stories at the center of the crisis.
A big-hearted novel about parenthood in a pandemic.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781956440478
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Madville Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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