Readers will be drawn in by the characters’ struggles to save themselves and each other as they fall in love.
In Hedger’s ambitious debut novel, two damaged people in rural Oklahoma strive to heal.
Readers meet Leotie “Leo” Lightfoot when Ray Shipworth, an EMT, finds her passed out alone in an abandoned “party” warehouse. She was left there by her loser boyfriend, Jake. Ray gets her stabilized and to the hospital. Meanwhile, Ray is planning to propose to his airhead girlfriend, May, when she dumps him. (May and Jake deserve each other; it’s a pity they don’t get together.) Ray joins the Army and spends one tour in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. He comes home almost irreparably shattered with PTSD. Leo is haunted by the fact that she’s never known her mother. When she finds out that she’s grown up being lied to about her mother, she’s devastated and runs off—back with Jake. So it goes with both of them: one step forward and two backward until, through patience and reaching out to others, both to give and receive help, they placate their demons and wind up in a place that any reader could see coming a mile away. And that’s OK; one can still appreciate the complications that arise, though some are a bit silly or contrived, developments that a lazy playwright might fall back on (looking at you, May). Hedger often overheats the prose—when a character takes an honest look at his relationship, she writes, “He examined their tenure together with removed rationale.” Despite this habit, she makes Leo and Ray very sympathetic characters. Hedger’s description of the horrors of the front lines are appropriately terrifying, as is the degradation that Leo suffers under Jake. A nice ironic bit: While Ray is dodging real, deadly, bullets, stoner Jake is playing Call of Duty in a haze of pot smoke. This debut novel has a lot of promising material, patchy though it is.
Readers will be drawn in by the characters’ struggles to save themselves and each other as they fall in love.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781509253456
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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