An old-fashioned form and two lively modern women make for an enjoyable novel.
A book order sent by letter from Paris to Seattle turns into a flourishing friendship.
It’s charming to encounter an epistolary novel these days. The once-popular form has fallen out of fashion in the age of digital communication, but Fay resuscitates it, setting her story in the early 1990s, the last possible time when it could be convincing. The letter writers are two young women, Kate Fair and Frida Rodriguez, who even meet through the mail. Kate works at Seattle’s Puget Sound Book Company and is given the task of answering a chatty letter Frida sends to the store ordering a copy of The Face of War, published in 1959 by journalist Martha Gellhorn. "I was told I’m the only person here who’s perky enough to respond to you," she writes. Frida wants the book because, although she was raised in Los Angeles, she’s living in Paris with big dreams of becoming what she calls a War Journo Dame. Kate, too, wants to be a writer and has finished several novels without publishing any. Their correspondence quickly becomes a friendship, their letters full of their personal histories, current dreams, and romantic relationships. Kate falls for a depressive young novelist, while Frida follows a dashing war correspondent to Sarajevo under siege—and suddenly her letters become heartbreakingly serious, no longer lively reports on Paris cafes but stark descriptions of the horror of war. She returns to Paris, unsure whether she has the courage to be a War Journo Dame, but finds a new passion working with refugees. Back in Seattle, Kate deals with her own losses and discoveries. Their voices remain distinct in the letters, often naïve, self-doubting, or overconfident, but authentically the voices of young women finding themselves. The book spans several years with lots of fun ’90s pop-culture details, and it often focuses on food, from peanut butter cookies to chiles rellenos, with several recipes included at the end.
An old-fashioned form and two lively modern women make for an enjoyable novel.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593852385
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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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