A debut novel of the ’60s that becomes more engaging as the pages turn.
Madden’s novel celebrates the Ohio River Valley in the 1960s and follows the intersecting lives of two young locals as they grow into adulthood.
Steubenville and Mingo Junction, Ohio, are towns dominated by Wheeling Steel. Jack Clark is the oldest child in a large, loving Irish Catholic family; his father, Tom, tried to escape Steubenville, but fate brought him back home and he took a job in the steel mill. Laurie Carmine’s Italian family is more well-to-do; her father took advantage of the G.I. Bill and became a doctor. The Clarks live right on the river; the Carmines live well away from it. However, Jack and Carmine meet in seventh grade in parochial school; shy Jack is smitten with Laurie right off the bat. The narrative tells their stories, but especially Jack’s: his school friends and his doubts, his striving in high school sports (a very big deal), and his dreams for the future. A keen sense of time and place is present, featuring such elements as the songs that the teens danced to; Jack’s first car, a Plymouth Valiant; the Vietnam War; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963; and the 1968 spring that claimed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and any innocence America had left. Do Jack and Laurie finally triumph as their love grows and deepens? To Madden’s credit, he keeps readers guessing in that regard; Jack goes missing in action in Vietnam, Laurie marries someone else, and that’s just for starters. A disclaimer tries to separate history from fiction, but it also notes that Jack’s life shares strong similarities with Madden’s. The book gets off to an awkwardly expository start with a scene of Laurie’s father laying out the whole Carmine family history at their Thanksgiving dinner. Soon, however, the story takes over and gingerly coexists with bits of local lore that the author seems proud to include, along with uncredited black-and-white photographs of various locations mentioned in the book, as well as footnotes.
A debut novel of the ’60s that becomes more engaging as the pages turn.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2023
ISBN: 9798987066812
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Potomac Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2024
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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