A lighthearted romp through an Irish community filled with characters that are as dysfunctional as they are delightful.
Three women from a suburban development in Ireland find surprising connections to each other as they attempt to move forward from mistakes they’ve each made in the past.
A hodgepodge group of neighbors from Pine Road, Dublin, uses WhatsApp to manage their poker schedule, but the chat group functions more as a gossip-filled neighborhood watch. When a new family moves into No. 8, the poker group is in a tizzy trying to collect information about the new neighbors. Edie Rice is particularly intrigued, not only because she loves a good mystery, but also because the new arrivals solidify Edie’s status as a longer-standing member of the neighborhood group. When Edie runs into the woman from No. 8, Martha Rigby, outside the market, she’s thrilled she will be able to report to WhatsApp with details about the sophisticated mystery woman. As the residents of Pine Road get to know Martha, she reveals that she relocated from Limerick with her husband and children because of some sort of trauma. Unable to stop herself, Edie investigates Martha’s past and discovers that her family fell victim to a crime before they moved. Edie confides this information to Robin Dwyer, another neighbor, and Robin begins to develop her own theories about what happened to send Martha running from Limerick. Meanwhile, Edie, Robin, and Martha confront complex personal issues within their own families relating to parenting and partnership, all while at the mercy of the neighborhood yentas. Despite a few too many slapstick moments and clichés of neighborhood busybodies, the story tackles many complicated issues relating to self-esteem, parenting, and interpersonal connections. The cast of characters is unnecessarily long, and there are a few too many subplots fighting for attention. Even so, there are sufficient comical twists and warmhearted connections to make the book great fun.
A lighthearted romp through an Irish community filled with characters that are as dysfunctional as they are delightful.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53788-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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