Another perfect beach read for sisters, estranged or not.
Faded B-movie star Ronni Sunshine has spent a lifetime alienating her three daughters. Now that she’s on her deathbed, she calls them home. But will they come?
The sisters have drifted away not only from their mother, but also from each other. Nell, the oldest, has always avoided her mother’s melodramatic, unpredictable rages. Now 33, her journey has included choosing teenage single-motherhood, and she’s raised her son, River, on a farm where she has found not only meaningful work as the manager, but also a compassionate mother-figure in Theodora, the owner. Meredith, the middle daughter, who bore the brunt of Ronni’s wrath, has learned to play the role of people-pleaser. Having fled to London and become an accountant, she still struggles with feelings of inadequacy, which she self-medicates with emotional eating and dysfunctional romantic relationships. The spoiled youngest, Lizzy, turned into a wild child, experimenting with boys, drugs, and alcohol, but has recently found success as a pop-up supper-club restaurateur. That success, however, may come at a price given her instant attraction to her married business partner. As Green (Falling, 2016, etc.) shifts back and forth among the sisters’ and Ronni’s perspectives, she sifts through the emotional wreckage of women inflicting wounds on themselves and each other. She convincingly depicts a frayed family with a keen eye for the details that snap the threads of sisterhood: Lizzy unleashes a verbal lashing when Nell denies her request to use her farm for a dinner, Meredith recoils from Nell’s plea for help with her financial report, Lizzy (and Ronni) humiliate Meredith over her boring fiance. Once back home, the sisters begin to forge new bonds by sharing their different memories of Ronni, who by this time has squirreled away a lethal collection of OxyContin pills to end her pain. Have they come home too late?
Another perfect beach read for sisters, estranged or not.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-58331-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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