A sometimes-overwritten but realistic and often touching story of intricate family relationships.
In Kent’s coming-of-age novel, an intelligent young woman struggles with her fraught relationship with her mother.
In the early 1940s, a 20-year-old woman named Leahis determined to go to college—in part, as an escape from her family’s cramped apartment in Brooklyn: “Sharing a home with her father, sister, and brother-in-law was bad enough, but the onslaught of [her sister’s]children had made it unbearable.” Leah is ecstatic when she’s able to move into a small room in a boarding house; at Brooklyn College, she falls under the spell of a handsome professor named Noah Oliver. He woos Leah with fancy dinners, and in time, the two get married; she gives birth to a daughter named Ninon, who becomes the focus of the narrative. The mother-daughter relationship is fraught from the beginning; Leah isn’t exactly thrilled by the challenges of motherhood, nor does she take kindly to interference from her mother-in-law, Linda, who loves to lavish attention on the little girl. What’s more, Ninon is a precocious child who’s able to read at a very young age. She finds traditional schooling to be a stifling waste of time, but as much as she’d like to participate in activities with adults, Leah reminds her repeatedly that Ninon’s her daughter, and not her friend. Leah’s parenting style is cold, to say the least, as she even unjustly blames Ninon for the death of a family member. At one point, Ninon says, not without reason, “My mother hates me. She has since the day I was born.” With time, can the two reconcile and reach an understanding?
Ninon’s childhood journey is extensively detailed, with references to Girl Scout cookie sales, summer camp, and a trip to Yankee Stadium, where a young Ninon gets to meet “the nineteen-year-old Yankee rookie sensation Mickey Mantle.” The latter might have been a rewarding surprise, but this event, like many others, involves an extensive buildup, with Ninon’s grandfather explaining, “I will get tickets for us at Yankee Stadium for the World Series, and I will even get to have you meet Mickey Mantle.” (The Mick, for his part, doesn’t have a lot to say, other than “We Okies la-ak to greet people with big be-ar hugs.”) Many other figures in the story state what they are going to do before doing it, as when one of Ninon’s later suitors announces that he’ll “meet [her] after work and walk [her] home,” before meeting her after work and walking her home. Despite all this unnecessary scene-setting, the more time that the reader spends with Ninon, the more likable she becomes—and the more grating her mother’s criticisms become. After one frightening mishap, her mother tells her that “your fatness buffered your landing, so you didn’t get killed.” As a result, it’s easy to feel for Ninon when she loses people who treat her more kindly, and it invests readers in the ongoing question of what Ninon will be like as she grows older, and how she’ll process the traumatic events of her past.
A sometimes-overwritten but realistic and often touching story of intricate family relationships.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2024
ISBN: 9798893083972
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Newman Springs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2025
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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