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BLOOD ON THE BRAIN

Smartly covers a few weeks of upheaval that push its heroine closer to adulthood.

A young Ghanian American woman fights through a complicated quarter-life crisis.

Akosua Agbe is a 24-year-old graduate student in history living in New York City. But instead of enrolling in classes, she pores over the course catalog until well after the term is underway. She’s recently broken up with her boyfriend, Wisdom, a medical student she still loves, because he didn’t think she was Ghanaian enough for him, calling into question her sense of self. Akosua tries to pursue another Ghanaian fellow on campus, Daniel, but he rejects her and then toys with her emotions. He also gives her some devastating news: Her father, who abandoned her when she was 7, is also in New York, teaching at another college. Amid this turmoil, Akosua falls in the shower and hits her head. At first, she doesn’t think she’s been hurt too badly, but as Thanksgiving approaches, it becomes clear she’s sustained a serious head injury that’s causing debilitating symptoms. The people in her life just want her to heal and learn to take better care of herself. Akosua comes to realize that might mean defying her loved ones’ expectations of her and learning how to make her own choices. Debut author Bediako captures well that poignant moment in a young person’s life when they must differentiate their own desires from their family’s and community’s to forge their own path. The trauma to Akosua’s brain amplifies just how much she was allowing inertia, an adolescent need to seek approval and please her elders, to dictate her next steps—or lack thereof. She can’t own her decisions until she fully makes them herself. Bediako highlights how that’s easier said than done, especially while straddling two cultures and identities.

Smartly covers a few weeks of upheaval that push its heroine closer to adulthood.

Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024

ISBN: 9781636281803

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Red Hen Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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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THE WEDDING PEOPLE

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

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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

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