A well-thought-out story about a resilient woman who discovers her true strength.
An athlete reflects on her life after her husband’s sudden disappearance in Kirscht’s novel.
Two weeks after Brian’s wife, Annika, miscarries in 2007, he goes on a sailing trip with two college friends, Dominic and Nils, and fails to return home, leaving her and their 6-year-old daughter, Sadie, alone and concerned. Annika, who’s in training for the U.S. Olympic swim team, seeks help from her rich and powerful in-laws, and she’s forced to reevaluate her familial relationships when she realizes that her husband’s parents are more concerned about their public image than the fact that their son has gone missing. She’s had a strained relationship with her own parents, as well, since she decided to marry into the much-disliked Wolfson family, but she quickly learns that she needs to rely on them, as well as herself, to keep the search for her spouse going. However, after Annika finds out that Brian took $10,000 of their savings with him, she must come to terms with the possibility that he purposely abandoned her and Sadie. Kirscht creates a multilayered story that will keep readers engaged with unexpected plot turns that confound expectations. The narrative keeps up a steady momentum, and the character development via conversations and inner monologueshelps give depth to their journeys. In one scene, Kirscht creates an ambiance of insecurity and exhaustion that’s highlighted by Annika’s pondering her past and wondering how she’ll continue to move forward for her daughter’s sake: “Would she, or either of them, ever reach the point where the sandy woodland lakes weren’t their ‘real’ home?” The story moves through Annika’s growth and pain, allowing readers not to only witness her resilience, but also to see how she helps Sadie to persevere. Although Annika has moments of resentment along the way, she learns to forgive and heal.
A well-thought-out story about a resilient woman who discovers her true strength.Pub Date: May 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-09-835215-8
Page Count: 326
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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