A story of family, healing, and the power of a really great accessory.
A young woman’s attempt to forge her own path leads her back to her family.
Celeste, Elodie, and Paulina Pavlin lead seemingly charmed lives. They are the three wealthy daughters of Alan, who owns and runs his family jewelry business. Pavlin & Co is credited with putting diamond engagement rings on the map, and its signature emerald green packaging is synonymous with love. (Sound familiar?) But when Alan decides—half for publicity, half on a King Lear–esque power trip—to award the prized Electric Rose diamond ring to the first of his daughters to get engaged, all hell breaks loose. Flash-forward 15 years: Paulina was the first to get married, but she and her husband are dead; their daughter, Gemma, a recent art school graduate with a passion for making jewelry more accessible to the masses, has no contact with the Pavlins. Elodie and Celeste have been feuding for years. Desperate to hold a showstopping auction of the family’s private jewelry collection as a way to bring Pavlin & Co back into relevancy, Elodie, now the company’s CEO, makes her way to Provincetown, where Celeste, long since cut off from the family money, has made a life for herself. Elodie tricks Gemma into joining her there because she needs both her sister’s and niece’s signatures to auction the collection. Gemma’s obsession with the Electric Rose (an obsession that wears on the reader very quickly), Celeste’s conviction that it’s cursed, and Elodie’s familial resentment lead to tense moments and attempts at amends. The book suffers from stilted dialogue, and the choice to make Gemma the emotional center of the novel was a misstep. That said, when Brenner leans into descriptions of the colorful characters of Provincetown and mines Elodie and Celeste’s fraught relationship, she makes up for many of the novel’s faults.
A story of family, healing, and the power of a really great accessory.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-08782-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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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