Strout’s many fans will love this sweet, rambling tale. More critical readers may feel it’s time for her to move on.
A group of familiar characters cluster around an almost-romance between writer Lucy Barton and lawyer Bob Burgess.
Strout’s latest novel is essentially a collection of stories, many of them shared by Lucy and Olive Kitteridge, who somewhat arbitrarily set this plotline in motion by telling Bob, “I have a story to tell that writer....I wish you would have her come visit me.” Lucy relocated to Crosby, Maine, with her ex-husband, William, during the pandemic, conveniently bringing together the people and backstories from most of Strout’s previous fiction. Among those returning with new chapters in their histories are Bob’s brother, Jim; sister, Susan; and ex-wife, Pam; along with his current wife, Margaret, a local minister who may be ousted by a parishioner whose defining quality is that he sleeps during services. The parishioner’s motive is never specified, which suits the overall tone of a novel anchored in the central premise of Strout’s work: “We all are such mysteries.” When Olive asks Lucy with irritation what the point of one of her stories is (readers may be wondering the same), Lucy answers, “People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.” A murder case in which Bob is defending a man accused of killing his mother offers the only firm closure here; more typical is another twist in the long-running issue of who was responsible for the death of Jim and Bob’s father, which culminates with the declaration, “No one will ever know.” Even Bob’s growing attraction to Lucy, though it reaches a crisis, subsides without definitive resolution. Strout’s tenderness for her characters and her belief that love is the only force in human lives as powerful as our essential loneliness are as moving as ever. But this all seems like very well-plowed terrain.
Strout’s many fans will love this sweet, rambling tale. More critical readers may feel it’s time for her to move on.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593446096
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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