An intriguing pair of plots about women’s reproductive rights starts off strong but goes astray.
A contemporary woman’s quest to have a baby is interwoven with a historical legal case about involuntary sterilization.
In the present day, the narrator is Jessa Gidney, a young lawyer at a Manhattan law firm who lives in a posh Upper East Side apartment with her husband, Vance, a hunky finance guy. Sounds pretty sweet, but Jessa’s growing obsession with getting pregnant and her ongoing failure to do so are putting massive strain on her job and marriage. Orphaned when her parents died in a car crash, she was raised by her doting grandmother and feels driven to continue the family line. When she takes on a pro bono case helping Isobel Pérez, an undocumented immigrant, avoid deportation, she learns that while in detention her client was surgically sterilized without giving consent—and Isobel isn’t the only one. The book’s historical plot focuses on Carrie Buck, a real person who in 1927 was the plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell. Carrie was born to a single mother, grew up in poverty, and had little education. After she was raped as a teenager, she bore a daughter who was immediately taken from her. She became a test case for a Virginia eugenics law that allowed the state to sterilize “promiscuous” or “feebleminded” women, with or without their consent. The court ruled the law was constitutional, and the eugenics theories it was based on became a foundation for the Holocaust. As Jessa passionately pursues Isobel’s case, she learns shocking secrets, some too close to home. For the first part of the book, the interlinked stories, the abuses of the women in the detention center, and the women’s engaging voices make a compelling combination. But in the last portion, the stories of Carrie and the immigrants drop into the background and Jessa takes over. Some of her successes, though, are unconvincing, and the plot ends up with too many loose ends.
An intriguing pair of plots about women’s reproductive rights starts off strong but goes astray.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781400347308
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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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