More fine work from a gifted storyteller: engrossing, well written, and affecting.
A grieving widower uncovers some long-buried family secrets in his mother’s native village in Italy.
Six years after historian Hugh Fisher’s wife died from cancer, her shoes are still in his closet, and his daughter, Susan, asks him bluntly if he ever plans to be happy again. After his well-regarded book about vanishing Italian towns garners Hugh several invitations to speak at Italian universities, Susan deplores his decision to spend six months there as yet another example of his wallowing in the past. But his plan to base himself in Valetto, the tiny village where his aging aunts still live, is upended when he learns that the cottage he inherited from his mother—her death is another recent trauma—is being occupied by someone his outraged Aunt Iris calls “a squatter.” Milanese chef Elisa Tomassi claims that her family was promised the cottage as recompense for assisting Hugh’s grandfather, who left his wife and daughters to join the anti-Fascist resistance during World War II and never returned. Veteran novelist Smith deftly weaves multiple themes of abandonment and loss throughout a compelling narrative studded with gorgeous descriptions of the Italian landscape and sharp character sketches; each of Hugh’s three aunts comes to life with ornery individualism, as do their indefatigably cheerful caretaker, Milo; his long-suffering wife, Donata; and other secondary characters. Hugh and Elisa are drawn to each other even as their separate agendas and individual psychic wounds threaten to keep them apart. A late-novel revelation about long-ago wrongdoing brings an overdue reckoning for a local fascist and enables Hugh to make peace with the mother he never felt he really knew. Nonetheless, Hugh acknowledges, “History does not offer us closure. It offers us the inscrutability of the present.” As this absorbing novel closes, Smith’s engaging protagonist seems ready to embrace this inscrutability and move on with his life.
More fine work from a gifted storyteller: engrossing, well written, and affecting.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780374607685
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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
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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