A heartfelt debut.
A floundering 30-something searches for purpose at a writers residency in the French Riviera.
When 23-year-old Poppy Banks met her elusive Aunt Margot for the first time, she wasn't sure what to expect. But Margot, who had been estranged from Poppy’s mother for decades, turned out to be the exact opposite of her sister, who had always fat-shamed Poppy and belittled her dreams of becoming a novelist. Full of infectious joie de vivre and endless encouragement, Margot became a beloved figure in Poppy’s life through secret annual lunch dates over the next nine years. Now, at 32, Poppy is no closer to being a published writer outside her soul-sucking job at content mill Thought Buzz. When Poppy tells Margot she’s ready to give up on writing, Margot cryptically makes her promise to say yes to anything good that comes her way. Six months later, Margot is dead and Poppy learns the truth: Margot ran a writers colony at her villa on the French Riviera, and she left it to Poppy to keep or sell, with two stipulations: Poppy must remain in France for at least six months, and she must draft a book while she’s there. When Poppy arrives, she’s met with gorgeous vistas, a handsome man who works for The Colony, and a life-changing $700,000 offer to sell the estate. Is this Poppy’s big chance to become a writer or to get out for good? Poppy’s struggles with her body image often feel shoehorned into the plot, and her relationship with her mother—far more interesting than the book’s romance—isn’t explored deeply enough. But the author deftly captures how it feels to be of a certain age without possessing the life one had hoped for, and descriptions of the sun-soaked French Riviera are rich and vivid.
A heartfelt debut.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780778334200
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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 surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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