From the plucky heroine whose life is not very hard to the easy potshots at stereotypical monster-moms, this novel is so...
From Hemmings (Juniors, 2015, etc.), a potato-chip–thin comedy about a single mother in San Francisco hoping to win a cookbook competition.
Thirtyish recipe blogger Mele is a struggling (with help from rich parents in Hawaii) but adoring single mom to 2-year-old Ellie. When she was pregnant, Mele's boyfriend, Bobby, dumped her for a woman he calls “the love of his life,” and he's finally marrying her in three weeks. Bobby wants Ellie to be the flower girl; Mele agrees but then obsesses about attending the wedding herself. Meanwhile, she enters a cookbook competition sponsored by the San Francisco Mother’s Club. If such an organization actually exists, no one would want to join it after reading Mele’s description of her horrible experiences with snobby members or the obnoxious online postings by monster-moms which are sprinkled throughout. Hemmings structures the novel as Mele’s answers to a questionnaire that competition entrants must fill out. Mele turns for inspiration to her own makeshift parent group that gathers at the unfashionable Panhandle playground, creating recipes inspired by stories from each member. Financially strapped mother-of-three Georgia worries about her teenage son, Chris, until they connect over In-N-Out burgers. Punkish, highly educated graphic artist Annie lets the goody-goody babysitter she shares with a monster-mom intimidate her but gets revenge with a special brownie. (Annie’s kitchen skills, equal to Mele’s, create a bit of sloppy plot redundancy.) Anxious realtor Barrett is aghast when her newly popular middle school son throws a “hood party” based on ugly racial and sexual attitudes. And then there is rich, handsome, sensitive Henry, whose wife is having an affair and whose friendship with Mele may be edging toward something more.
From the plucky heroine whose life is not very hard to the easy potshots at stereotypical monster-moms, this novel is so contrived it’s hard to believe it comes from the same author as the emotionally wrenchingThe Descendents (2007).Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0079-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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