An intricately satisfying story about love and understanding that is full of both nostalgia and surprising optimism.
A stodgy Midwestern socialite is forced to re-evaluate many of her deeply held beliefs in this stunning debut.
Violet Baumgartner has been crafting an annual Christmas letter for the past three decades, providing detailed updates about the goings-on in the picturesque life of the Baumgartner family. This year’s letter is particularly exciting because Violet’s doting husband, “dear Ed,” is retiring from his lifelong career as a medical researcher. While Ed spent most of his married years toiling away in the lab, Violet has thrown herself into leadership roles in her church community as well as various charitable endeavors. Most of all, Violet has enjoyed raising her now-grown daughter, Cerise. As is her way, Violet has given 110 percent to planning a spectacular formal retirement party for Ed, with every detail choreographed. Unfortunately, when the party occurs, the local celebrity who has come to speak about Ed also reveals during her toast that Cerise and her female partner, Barb, are expecting a baby. Violet is flummoxed that her daughter is pregnant and even more so by the fact that she doesn’t know how the baby was conceived or who the father might be. She faints in front of their party guests, cracks her skull, and is rushed to the hospital. Thank goodness Ed is no longer working so he is home to care for Violet, whose slow recuperation leaves her unable to micromanage every aspect of her family’s life. Even so, Violet embarks on a quest from her recovery bed to unearth the identity of her grandbaby’s father, risking her own relationship with her daughter in the process. Violet also inadvertently discovers many secrets about the members of her family and her community during her investigation, which threatens to further derail her overly quaint existence. This is a complicated novel full of subtle humor, multidimensional characters, and unexpected twists.
An intricately satisfying story about love and understanding that is full of both nostalgia and surprising optimism.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0786-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
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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