A thoughtful tale that explores a friendship between two men trying to live authentic lives.
In Whitehouse’s debut novel, a man named Quentin “Q.” Yonally Dettweiler meets a mysterious and charismatic man who turns his life upside down—and helps him to discover his true calling.
The story’s protagonist is 26 years old and working as a health care consultant for a firm located near a California beach. Although nothing seems obviously amiss in his life, he feels unsatisfied. “I was wrapped in the carousel of a monotonous existence,” he reflects early on, “a life being lived incomplete.” However, an impromptu meeting at a coffee shop with a striking, wealthy man named James Jersig irrevocably changes the course of Q.’s life. Jersig impulsively invites him aboard his yacht for a lavish party, where he winds up hiring Q. as both an assistant and as his own personal scribe: “I’d like you to write for me each week. A piece that draws on the emotions, situations, and events from the week prior.” Working for Jersig provides Q. with a glimpse into a life of luxury, which also involves tense business dealings and potentially illegal associations. However, the major draw for Q. is the fact that Jersig seems to see him for who he is—and that he recognizes the man that he hopes to become: “What you search for is authenticity,” Jersig observes; for far too long, Q. realizes, he’s lived the life he thought he should rather than the one he wanted. Overall, this is a relatively brief book, but Whitehouse maintains a clipped pace throughout the narrative that keeps it moving forward. The story is part mystery, part philosophical musing, and it explores what it means to get a second chance at life and to seize opportunity when it comes one’s way. Much of this message is conveyed through conversations between the characters—particularly between Q., Jersig, and Jersig’s partner, Cadence. Although the text sometimes feels heavily freighted with gravitas—as when Q. writes down the question, “Is there a place in the world for a man such as me?”—it also helps propel the story and clarify plot points that might have otherwise been murky.
A thoughtful tale that explores a friendship between two men trying to live authentic lives.Pub Date: July 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0578721255
Page Count: 112
Publisher: John Barnabus Whitehouse
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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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