by Ellen Cooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2023
A shining exploration of human frailty and endurance falters when it attempts social analysis.
A 44-year-old woman comes to terms with her life while attending an annual corporate banquet.
Software analyst Trisha Donahue always relished the annual boozy parties thrown at the Rose & Emerald restaurant in central Massachusetts by the Boston company where she’s worked for eight years. But new management runs the company with a more corporate ethos, and speechifying has replaced drinking alcohol, no longer allowed, at the now unofficially mandatory banquets. Having learned that she’s been passed over for a promotion she was all but promised, Trisha is a reluctant attendee this year. Then she’s stunned, not in a good way, when management announces to the crowd that she’s the first woman “Employee of the Year.” Trisha flees within the passageways of the almost magically charming Rose & Emerald, located (perhaps too) coincidentally in the community where she grew up “on the wrong side of the tracks.” While Cooney effectively draws peripheral characters like Trisha’s privileged yet self-aware husband and her stoic, ailing boss, the only character that truly matters here is Trisha. As she struggles through this one crazy day, she reviews her evolution from a working-class girl with brains and ambition to a woman afraid to rock the status quo. The depiction of Trisha’s middle-class financial anxiety is spot-on, but Cooney lays on the sociopolitical critique with a heavy hand. Trisha so relentlessly complains about blockheaded bosses and bemoans turning “corporate” that the good reasons she’s angry become boring. The novel’s explorations of class inequality and corporate mentality seldom reach beyond the obvious, and its perspective on society’s unfair treatment of women seems dated—Trisha has no awareness of the #MeToo movement, and her thoughts on what clothes a successful woman needs, including pantyhose, feel anachronistic. But Cooney is remarkably adept at capturing minute inner crises within an individual and the imperfect but real connections between people. While the writing can be pessimistic, even cynical, neither Cooney nor her central character is afraid to look kindness in the face when it arises. No mean feat.
A shining exploration of human frailty and endurance falters when it attempts social analysis.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781566896719
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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by Fredrik Backman ; translated by Neil Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2025
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: today
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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by Fredrik Backman ; translated by Neil Smith
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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