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MONA LISA SMILES

A charming novel about how family can be destiny.

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In Lloyd’s latest novel, a single woman’s life is upended by her unstable brother.

Yes, Mona Lisa Buttaro was named after the famous Leonardo da Vinci painting, and yes, she hates her name. After a lifetime of jokes, she’s more or less the last Buttaro standing: Her father has been dead for over 10 years, her mother lives in a retirement community, and her brother, the clinically paranoid and germophobic Joey, resides in a group home. Three months ago, Mona, 37, moved into the old family house in Seattle to clean it out and sell it. She’s also taken over operation of the family restaurant, Booty’s Cafe. She’s barely keeping it together—the long hours, the house, her mother’s Doberman, Figaro—when two intrusions make her life even more complicated. The first is Joey, who (along with the voice in his head named Saint Signore) leaves the group home and moves himself back into the house unannounced. The second is Cliff, the most popular guy from her high school class, who’s now a hot single-dad contractor. Cliff, who runs into Mona at Booty’s, volunteers his services as she prepares the house for sale. Mona has been unlucky in love for so long that she can’t help but wonder if Cliff might be the answer to her prayers. That is, if Joey and his voices (and her mother’s unexpected second marriage…and a secret half sibling reappearing out of nowhere) don’t screw it up. Mona narrates most of the novel, though some chapters follow Cliff and Joey as well. Lloyd’s prose is buoyant and engaging throughout: “Since Joey started working at Booty’s, his life had been warped out of shape, stretched and twisted to conform to Moni’s daily routine. He’d been determined to find a way to squirm out of going to the restaurant ever again—until last night, when his world went topsy-turvy.” Less a romantic comedy than a partly heightened story of a slightly dysfunctional Italian American family, the novel will win readers over with its deftly drawn characters and spirited scenes.

A charming novel about how family can be destiny.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2024

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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THE WEDDING PEOPLE

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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