Another exceptional entry in the O’Neill corpus.
A sports agent’s pursuit of a soccer prodigy stirs up old family resentments.
O’Neill’s breakthrough novel, Netherland (2008), was partly a paean to cricket and tracked one character’s quest to build an arena in Brooklyn. Here the sport is soccer and the holy grail is an elusive young player who’s somewhere in Africa. None of that is evident as the book opens with a chapter narrated by Lakesha Williams, co-founder of a technical-writing cooperative in Pittsburgh, who faces an HR challenge with a fractious colleague named Mark Wolfe. It’s only in the next chapter, narrated by Mark (he and Lakesha alternate), that we learn of his younger half brother, Geoffrey Anibal, who’s begging Mark for help in locating the prodigy—named Godwin, as if to suggest what a prize he could be. Geoff is a fledgling sports agent and a bit of a con man looking to kick-start a career and a fortune. Mark feels their mother not only neglected him but also cheated him out of an inheritance. O’Neill has a gift for finding humor in emotional stress, and it shines in the two men’s confrontations and in the co-op’s increasingly tense office politics. The semi-siblings bring in a third potential ally for their Godwin campaign, a veteran French soccer agent named Jean-Luc Lefebvre. The three go through twists and turns, culminating in an African odyssey—rendered by Lefebvre in an astonishing marathon of storytelling—that highlights the avarice of sports recruitment and the legacy of colonialism. Along with these banner themes are the overarching questions: How should we treat each other and how do we deal with mistreatment, on any scale? While the Lakesha and Mark narratives both serve these themes, some readers may struggle with how disparate the story lines remain until a late and surprising convergence. But then good stories often rely on delayed gratification.
Another exceptional entry in the O’Neill corpus.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780593701324
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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