A transporting debut that deftly probes the complex nature of relationships between women.
As she deals with boredom and isolation after being uprooted to Brazil for her husband’s career, the wife of an academic forges interesting, fraught connections with two other women.
At the opening of Burnham’s debut, lapsed writer Linda is on the brink of leaving her historian husband when he learns that he has earned a visiting professorship in São Paulo. Rather than end the marriage, she travels with him, embarking on her own journey of self-discovery. Their university-provided apartment in São Paulo comes with a maid, Marta, who cooks and cleans, exacerbating Linda’s sense of purposelessness as she wanders the streets of São Paulo aimlessly or else sits at home feeling useless. Linda’s situation begins to change as she first takes up painting, finally finding a means of personal expression, and then meets Celia, a beguiling theater artist who serves as a vehicle for Linda’s self-discovery. Unfortunately, the novel falters slightly at the end; Burnham sets up Linda’s dynamic with Marta as an emotionally, socially, and socio-economically complex one that will inevitably lead to some kind of emotional breakthrough, but when it does, it feels forced and clichéd—even a little white savior–ish—and does not ring entirely true. In addition, the novel’s ambitious second-person narration becomes grating and strange at times. Nevertheless, the fact that the narrative is addressed to a man—Linda’s husband—lends it additional power, transforming it into a sort of feminist rejoinder to patriarchical dismissiveness of domestic work, a document of the unseen complexity of women’s lives, no matter how quiet. At its best, the novel is a subtle and adept character study that reveals the power of connections between women. The novel is buoyed as well by Burnham’s dreamy prose, with which she conjures memorable images of Brazil. Though the plot is not entirely coherent, specifically when it comes to the development of Linda’s relationship with Marta, the author’s psychological insight and skill in portraying the multifaceted nature of female friendship make for a compelling read.
A transporting debut that deftly probes the complex nature of relationships between women.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984855-83-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
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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