A lovely and literate family drama that wins bonus points for its sincerity and open-hearted delivery.
Love and money struggle for control of a modern family’s affections.
In her wonderfully cohesive debut novel, short-story writer Tedrowe graduates to elegant novelist with a winding, convincing familial drama about the ties that bind and the bonds that bend to the breaking point. The book opens on a small-town wedding in June, the stuff that rural newspapers love, as 78-year-old Winifred Easton McClelland prepares herself for marriage to powerful Chicago mogul Jerry Trevis. From her first steps into the story, Winnie is the most winning member of a multifaceted cast, a widow who has found love in the winter of her life. “She was marrying a man for the delicious and wicked and simple reason that she wanted to,” Tedrowe writes. Jerry, too, is a splendid fiction, a stubborn old rogue with a soft spot for his girl and her challenging children, but one with a mean streak when it comes to his own rebellious offspring. Jerry’s wealth and his old age soon inject chaos into this very extended family. Who stands to lose? First and foremost, Jerry’s daughter Annette, who launches a power struggle with her father for control of the business empire. The mogul shows a soft spot for Winnie’s daughter, Rachel, whose acceptance of a loan from her new stepfather only serves to hide the failures of her lazy and financially incompetent husband. But no one stands to gain more than Jerry’s grandson Avery, who reminds the old man of his lost brother so much that the recovering addict and high-rolling chef stands to get it all. Tedrowe unfurls all of this familiar, troubled interplay via the perspective of a specific character in each chapter, and while Avery garners an unfair share of the spotlight, the author’s deft handling of a large and distinctive cast should win raves from those who revel in this sort of ensemble crazy quilt.
A lovely and literate family drama that wins bonus points for its sincerity and open-hearted delivery.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-185947-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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