An absorbing, French-accented story of a complex father-son bond.
A father and son strive to heal their relationship in a novel set in France and the United States.
Business is very good for Victor Marchand and his son, JP. Victor, who lives in France, is a “picker,” a buyer of traditional and authentic dismantled goods, while JP runs their import establishment, Les Beaux Châteaux, in Manhattan. Money means nothing to their rich clientele, which benefits both of them. But the death of Victor’s wife and JP’s mother, Frida, was a crushing blow. Never close, the father and son are drifting even further apart. JP feels a hollowness in his life. He takes a leave from the store and pours his energies into remodeling his mansion in the Hamptons. Then he flies to France to help his grieving father. On returning to New York, he finds that the office manager he trusted has absconded, emptied the safe, and wiped the computers clean. JP has to fight to start over, and father and son bond through the calamity. As they do, each get a shot at an enduring love: Victor with Caterina, a Russian expat, and JP with Veronique, a Frenchwoman, or Sharon Tracker, a brilliant Native American attorney. Along with their romantic entanglements, another story plays out as JP and Victor realize how much they need each other and enjoy spending time together. Will their new respect last, or will the men grow apart again? Screenwriter Marks creates truly rounded characters as she paints a memorable picture of the import business and the decline of small French towns, as when she writes: “French boulangeries used to be iconic and indubitable on the main street of every village in France. The buildings that housed them were often crafted to suit the needs of several generations, not only in the fortitude of the materials used—marble and mahogany, granite and walnut—but also in their classic, elegant proportion and simplicity….Today’s bakers either can’t make a living selling bread, or they won’t.” As readers root for JP and Victor to thrive, they’ll get a delicious taste of France.
An absorbing, French-accented story of a complex father-son bond.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985456608
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2022
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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