A gritty music story/romance with an endearing narrator.
A novel focuses on the journey of a washed-up rock star who becomes an unlikely father figure.
Damen Warner is the frontman for the band OBNXS, which has just been dumped by its label. Damen lives with a motley crew of roommates and a rooster in Chicago who are on a downward spiral: “It hadn’t taken long for” the band’s “bad habits to settle into a routine…boozing and jamming,” messing around with “dancers and drugs…until the sun came up and the whole cycle started over again.” But there is hope for the group when an investor agrees to help fund its next project. Though Damen’s career has taken a positive turn, his personal life is in upheaval. He has fraught dealings with his family; he is struggling to get inspiration for his latest album; and he is unclear about the terms of his relationship with Melody, a stripper at a club he frequents. When he is called in to babysit Melody’s daughter, Victoria, at the last minute, he begins to form a bond with the girl, instructing her to stand up to school bullies and even taking her trick-or-treating. As he and the band try to record a new album, they join forces with a millennial blogger who helps OBNXS go viral, capitalizing on Damen’s public escapades. But Damen and Melody’s relationship is tested as he struggles to cope with her clients and Victoria’s father, a rich guy who hates the musician and wants to take the child from her mother. In this engaging, well-crafted sequel, Damen’s narrative voice is distinct, raw, and cynical, just right for a 30-year-old rock star trying to get back on top. Gebien establishes Damen’s voice from the very first page. The protagonist warns readers: “Well, congratulations. It’s all downhill from here. You don’t have to turn back—it’s a free country. You can do what you want. Go ahead and stare at the sun while you’re at it: it will probably cause less damage to your retinas than the escalating indecency ahead. Still here? God help you.” But for all the discussion of Damen’s rock dreams, he doesn’t make much music throughout the course of the book. This is one rich area that could have been further explored.
A gritty music story/romance with an endearing narrator.Pub Date: July 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-578-38589-1
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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