A well-told story with evocative prose that bares—and bears—the ragged emotions that accompany a journey to healing.
A 36-year-old indie rock star goes on a weeklong cruise with her father after her mother unexpectedly dies.
Greta James is struggling. She hasn’t played a concert in months, her new album is delayed, and she’s broken up with her boyfriend. All this pales in comparison to the spark that set off these events: Her mother suffered a brain aneurism and died before Greta could get to her. Now, the Alaskan cruise that her parents had been looking forward to taking for their 40th anniversary is here, and her mother is not. Greta’s brother, Asher, convinces Greta to go on the cruise with their father, and she decides to do it for her mother even though she and her father have not gotten along since her career started to take off. While on the cruise, Greta meets Ben Wilder, an academic who's there to lecture about his new novel based on the work of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Sparks fly. The cruise is hard, emotionally complicated, stressful, and a balm, both for Greta and her father. Author Smith has crafted a story about mothers and daughters, fathers and children, grief, happiness, and healing—and also about the music industry, hard work, dreams, and relationships both old and new. The power of the Alaskan scenery breathes through the pages, and Greta's grief about her mother’s death is palpable. But sometimes the best way to handle grief is to move through it, as someone tells Greta on the ship, even though the route might be hard. Readers of Evvie Drake Starts Over will enjoy this book.
A well-told story with evocative prose that bares—and bears—the ragged emotions that accompany a journey to healing.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35827-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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