Both an insightful depiction of therapy supporting growth and a dead-on skewering of corporate culture.
A stressed-out bank executive questions what she really wants in life in Wierman’s novel.
“Standing there in pajamas she’d been wearing for most of the last month, milky face pale, red hair wild,” Chicago-based Madeline, 49, tells her fiancé, Rob, that she is scared she is going crazy since she just found a missing earring in an unexpected place in their apartment. He sympathetically reminds her, “I think your world has been pretty well upended.” The novel then flashes back to six months earlier, when Madeline, on the way to her job as a senior vice president at National Megabank, spots and brings home a stray that reminds her of the cat that her grandmother, who raised her, took away from her as a child; the incident seems to spark something in her. Madeline then, as usual, gets emmeshed in time-sucking work meetings and demands from her boss. She has recently started seeing Olivia, a therapist who has her explore her feelings more thoroughly than she ever has before. Madeline makes the momentous decision to quit her job, shocking her married best friend, Emma, who also works at the bank and is now contemplating the promise of a promotion. Will Madeline find her true vocation? Can Emma advance at the bank while also balancing being a wife and mother? The author notes that she quit jobs with Fortune 500 companies after decades of “building a career that was lucrative, ego-boosting, and a little bit soul-crushing.” Anyone who has toiled in corporate America will appreciate the inclusion of nagging corporate email correspondence and a fake-nice CEO—there are plenty of laugh-wince moments to enjoy in this novel. Wierman also masterfully delves into deeper psychological ground as Madeline’s reckonings with her issues are dramatically realized in interactions with Olivia and others.
Both an insightful depiction of therapy supporting growth and a dead-on skewering of corporate culture.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 978-1684632169
Page Count: 400
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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