Great fun, and with a few poignant moments too.
Nantucket in summer, four chummy couples, romantic intrigue and a possible murder, in the latest from Hilderbrand (A Summer Affair, 2008, etc.).
The book opens with the death of Greg and Tess MacAvoy. Sailing from Nantucket to Martha’s Vineyard for their 12th anniversary, the beloved couple is found drowned, trapped under their boat. Ed Kapenash, Nantucket Chief of Police and one of Greg’s best friends, has to break the news to his wife Andrea, Tess’s cousin. They are joined in mourning by rich, cultured Addison Wheeler; his wife Phoebe, a pill-popping zombie since her twin’s death on 9/11; wild Delilah Drake (in love with Greg); and her stoic husband Jeff. Inseparable for years, the four couples loved and respected each other, vacationed together, watched each other’s children; in fact, they seemed to have an idyllic life of friendship on the island—until the death of Greg and Tess uncovers all their dirty secrets. The toxicology report finds heroin in the bloodstream of sweet, overcautious Tess, a kindergarten teacher and doting mother of twins. Ed also finds five phone calls on Tess’s phone from Addison the morning of the sail. Were the MavAvoys’ deaths an accident or a murder plot gone wrong? Much of the mystery hinges on what happened between Greg, a music teacher at the local high school, and April Peck, a student who several months earlier accused him of sexual misconduct. With a few strings pulled by Ed, Greg’s career was saved, but the strain of the scandal has unforeseen consequences on the surviving friends. In mourning, each feels somehow culpable; slowly they confront together the sordid underbelly of their seemingly respectable lives. If the plot becomes a bit stretched at the end, never mind: Hilderbrand has a master’s touch at characterization, making the novel’s players seem so familiar that the revelation of their secrets is irresistible.
Great fun, and with a few poignant moments too.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-04389-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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