A whimsical portrait of a still-raw community that mostly hits the mark.
In the immediate wake of 9/11, a young family uproots their lives in Manhattan to resettle in a ramshackle Rockaway beach house—and, over the course of one momentous weekend, finds a whole lot more drama than they bargained for.
Desperate for a new place to live and short on cash, Dan and Sue Glassman are vulnerable when Dan's curmudgeonly father, Sy, makes them an offer too convenient to refuse: if Sue, now pregnant with the couple’s third child, will finally convert to Judaism, Sy will buy the family a beach house in Rockaway, with the controversial caveat that he’ll also live there. And this time, though she has resisted conversion for years, Sue acquiesces: “Blame hormones or love or the post-terror downtown stench, but moving suddenly seemed like the only option.” But the house comes with baggage of its own, and when the previous owner, Rose—a plucky 90-year-old who, less than a decade earlier, got away with (literal) murder in the dining room—wheels up to the front door the weekend of Sue’s conversion party and refuses to leave, the family’s best-laid plans are thrown into chaos. If Rose is telling the truth, the house has been sold without her consent; if she isn’t, the fact remains that they still have to figure out what to do with the geriatric force of nature squatting on the premises. But while they don’t know it, the Glassmans have something of an unlikely guardian in their next-door neighbor Tim Ray, a divorced ex-firefighter with half a nose who’s haunted by the mistakes of his booze-soaked past and feels an inexplicable attachment to the family. With tremendous tenderness, Eisenstadt (Kiss Out, 1991, etc.) captures the traumatized Rockaway of the early 2000s in swirling Technicolor, though her zany and colorful characters never quite manage to transcend their laundry lists of quirks to become fully human. But what the novel lacks in nuance, it makes up in heart.
A whimsical portrait of a still-raw community that mostly hits the mark.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-31690-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown
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
Sink into this book like a hot, scented bath...a delicious, relaxing pleasure. And a clever whodunit at the same time.
A wedding on Nantucket is canceled when the bride finds her maid of honor floating facedown in the Atlantic on the morning of the big day.
One of the supporting characters in Hilderbrand's (Winter Solstice, 2017, etc.) 21st Nantucket novel is Greer Garrison, the mother of the groom and a well-known novelist. Unfortunately, in addition to all the other hell about to break loose in Greer's life, she's gone off her game. Early in the book, a disappointed reader wonders if "the esteemed mystery writer, who is always named in the same breath as Sue Grafton and Louise Penny, is coasting now, in her middle age." In fact, Greer's latest manuscript is about to be rejected and sent back for a complete rewrite, with a deadline of two weeks. But wanna know who's most definitely not coasting? Elin Hilderbrand. Readers can open her latest with complete confidence that it will deliver everything we expect: terrific clothes and food, smart humor, fun plot, Nantucket atmosphere, connections to the characters of preceding novels, and warmth in relationships evoked so beautifully it gets you right there. Example: a tiny moment between the chief of police and his wife. It's very late in the book, and he still hasn't figured out what the hell happened to poor Merritt Monaco, the Instagram influencer and publicist for the Wildlife Conservation Society. Even though it's dinner time, he has to leave the "cold blue cans of Cisco beer in his fridge” and get back to work. " ‘I hate murder investigations,’ [his wife] says, lifting her face for a kiss. ‘But I love you.’ " You will feel that just as powerfully as you believe that Celeste Otis, the bride-to-be, would rather be anywhere on Earth than on the beautiful isle of Nantucket, marrying the handsome, kind, and utterly smitten Benji Winbury. In fact, she had a fully packed bag with her at the crack of dawn when she found her best friend's body.
Sink into this book like a hot, scented bath...a delicious, relaxing pleasure. And a clever whodunit at the same time.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-37526-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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