A gentle, poignant tale with nicely developed real and fictional characters.
Caugherty offers a Depression-era coming-of-age novel set amid the beauty of California’s Yosemite National Park.
It’s 1934, and 16-year-old Isabel Dickinson has just finished her second year of high school in San Francisco when a tragic accident takes the life of her young sister, Audrey. Life at home with her mother, in the city’s rough Tenderloin District, had already become unbearable; now, as she struggles with Audrey’s death, she asks her friend Claude DeVille to drive her to Yosemite, where her older brother, James, is working for the Civilian Conservation Corps. She flees one day before dawn, unaware that women aren’t allowed in the Cascades Camp: “She was doing it: leaving Mother, the flat, the San Francisco cold. At long last she was traveling to a beautiful, wondrous place.” After their arrival, Isabel passes out due to an excruciating migraine. She wakes the following morning in a tiny apartment above a post office that belongs to Enid Michael and her husband, Charles. Enid, a delightfully eccentric and bubbly older woman, is Yosemite’s first and, at the time, only female ranger-naturalist, while Charles is Yosemite’s assistant postmaster. At this point, Caugherty seamlessly blends fact and fiction; the Michaels are real-life historical figures, and Enid’s nemesis, Chief Naturalist Bert Harwell, did repeatedly attempt to have her removed from her position for being too unconventional. She’s the perfect mentor for Isabel, who convinces the couple to let her stay with them through the summer, earning her keep by helping Enid with her wildflower garden and typing articles the Michaels write for local publications. As Isabel gradually discovers peace, redemption, and a new life trajectory, readers are treated to a veritable encyclopedia of intriguing and informative details about the flora, fauna, and natural wonders of Yosemite. Caugherty’s love letter to the extraordinary park has a simple plot, but the breezy, conversational prose is engaging, capturing the despair of the Depression and the frustration of women struggling for equality. Isabel is a sturdy, compelling protagonist, but it’s quirky Enid who will linger in readers’ minds.
A gentle, poignant tale with nicely developed real and fictional characters.Pub Date: April 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781685131807
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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