A thoughtful, tender meditation on mortality and transformation.
In Smith’s novel, a middle-aged man confronts a life of lies in the wake of his mother’s death.
An urgent call from Spencer House hospice doesn’t just summon Emory Harrell home to small-town Rushton, North Carolina—it upends his life altogether. There’s much he’s leaving behind, including a shot at securing senior partner at a prestigious Atlanta law firm and a gorgeous and brilliant fiancee. Most importantly, he must relinquish any sense of control. Within a day of his arrival in Rushton, Emory’s beloved mother is dead. Her last words to him: “Quit trying so hard.” When Emory begins to volunteer at Spencer House, he meets Agnes, the mysterious nurse’s aide who witnessed his mother’s final moments. Emory begins to interrogate both the restrictive perimeters of his secure lifestyle and the very boundary between the living and the dead. What ensues is a heartfelt chronicle of a man undoing the seams of his carefully crafted existence, resulting in a transcendental, if devastating rejection of 50 years living the life of the mind. Emory’s reckoning with his own illusions of control is chock-full of lessons for a 21st-century life in which every new iteration of reality seems like something to be protected against. As the narrative reaches a stunning and unexpected resolution, Emory and Agnes celebrate “the chance to die while [we’re] still livin’,” disrupting all we assume we know about ourselves and the basis of our connections with others. What emerges in its place is something richer, a glimpse of the proverbial path not traveled despite its enticing offerings. Earnest and thoughtfully executed, this book shines a light on all of the phantom lives that are merely assemblages of the ghosts of expectations; it is, at its simplest, a reminder that “livin’ for certainty just keeps life flat.”
A thoughtful, tender meditation on mortality and transformation.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2023
ISBN: 979-8891212992
Page Count: 311
Publisher: ISBN Services
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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