Fans of light romance and family reunions will savor this sensitive portrait of love transcending grief.
Lauren Kincaid just wants to escape the public eye, but that isn't so easy as the widow of Rory, an NHL hockey player who enlisted in the Army and was killed in action while serving in Iraq. She hopes to gain some privacy to mourn by retreating to her family's beach house on the Jersey shore.
Her privacy is complicated after four years when Lauren’s parents, sister, and 6-year-old nephew arrive for the summer. Even worse, attractive filmmaker Matt Brio, determined to make a documentary about Rory, wants to interview Lauren before he loses funding. Although Matt, too, admires Rory, he suspects that there may be more to the story of an American saint than his heroism. Unearthing revelations about a man everyone adored and no one wants to malign proves difficult. Eventually, Lauren and her sister agree to cooperate, and Matt’s interviews expose several skeletons in Rory’s closet. Toggling between Lauren’s new life—a life she keeps too busy to dwell on the past—and flashbacks to her buried memories of Rory, Brenner (The Forever Summer, 2017, etc.) empathetically portrays a fragile woman hiding secrets from herself. In Lauren’s memory, they were the perfect couple, high school sweethearts. Rory was the star hockey player, a junior who spotted a shy, pretty sophomore girl running track and fell in love. Though they were inseparable in high school, Rory pushed Lauren away for a brief period during college so he could concentrate on academics and hockey at Harvard, where he generated a lot of interest, landing him a place with the L.A. Kings. Reunited after college, they moved to California, and although Lauren supported him, Rory struggled to gain ice time. His abrupt decision to enlist terrified Lauren but came as no surprise to Rory’s beloved older brother, Emerson. Brenner deftly orchestrates the painful peeling away of Lauren’s memories, and just when it seems that Lauren is simply a heartbroken widow, questions surface: Why does Emerson hold a grudge against her? Why didn’t Lauren know Rory was going to volunteer for a second tour? Only an unflinching look at the truth will let Lauren move on and, perhaps, find a new life.
Fans of light romance and family reunions will savor this sensitive portrait of love transcending grief.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39490-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
