A small, brittle, not entirely focused story of class and lost illusions.
The web of unhappiness ensnaring the children of an upper-class English family fascinates a restless American visitor.
Chilly, and peopled by a cast of more or less damaged characters, Toynton’s (The Oriental Wife, 2011, etc.) third novel spins a downbeat tale exploring the destructive spiral of the Digby family, whose idyllic Devon home is also the heart of its suffering. The house is presided over by matriarch and famous scientist Helena, whose domineering, narcissistic personality has extended a profound influence over her three children. This history is uncovered slowly by an outsider, widowed American Annie Devereaux, who has fled New York after her husband’s sudden death. An unexpected encounter on a London street with Helena’s son, Julian, leads to a relationship that morphs from sex and sharing into withering cruelty, apparently Julian’s familiar pattern. But before the relationship founders, Annie is introduced to Julian’s sister Isabel, who offers another facet of the family—beautiful, intellectual, and wounded. There’s also a third sibling, math prodigy Sasha, whose mental illness is at times an effective weapon against her selfishly controlling mother. Annie, with her Anglophilia and romantic view of Devon, courtesy of her long-absent father, is magnetized by both Isabel and her home. The text is sprinkled with references to Brideshead Revisited, Toynton’s acknowledgement of some parallels between the two stories. But she pulls her own narrative westward, setting up contrasts between Britain and the U.S. and problematical single-family homes on either side of the Atlantic. It’s a finely phrased and observed piece of writing but doesn’t fully characterize its narrator nor break the doomed family out of the mold. Even though the Digby secrets are exposed and Annie moves on to yet another (imperfect) relationship, little emerges in the way of resolution.
A small, brittle, not entirely focused story of class and lost illusions.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-921-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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