A compelling premise with a plot that intensifies satisfyingly in the second half, this book is a good bet for readers who...
In a novel exploring the fragile ties of friendship, love, and family, Brown (Come Away With Me, 2015) takes on the loaded subject of surrogate motherhood between a pair of best friends—and the unforeseen turmoil and tragedy that result.
Hannah and Kate have been linked at the hip since fifth grade, and they possess the sort of easy intimacy—a constant daily connection—that some only find with family members or spouses and some find, well, never at all. Both in their mid-30s and happily ensconced in Bay Area homes with sweet, doting husbands, just one thing mars their otherwise idyllic-seeming friendship: the fact that Hannah and her husband, Ben, have been frantically trying to conceive for years, while Kate and husband David are already parents to two young daughters. Hannah wants to become a mother so badly, the subject of other people's babies can transform her into a seething pit of envy and pain. After a fresh round of fertility tests in which her doctor essentially tells Hannah to start looking into other options, she’s understandably shattered. She has an off-putting aversion to adoption, which Brown doesn't really bother to explain, so Hannah immediately begins mulling over hiring a surrogate. When Kate steps up to the plate instead, offering not only to carry the baby, but her own eggs as well, Hannah and Ben find little reason to say no, and they excitedly begin the process. Kate quickly gets pregnant using Ben's sperm (it's a boy!), and everything moves along promisingly—until a series of dramatic health crises befall Kate, threatening to derail, well, everything. Lawyers become involved, as do protesters, and the four friends’ bonds are tested to a degree no one would wish on a distant enemy.
A compelling premise with a plot that intensifies satisfyingly in the second half, this book is a good bet for readers who don’t shy away from difficult moral questions swirling around a sometimes-sappy center.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1893-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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