An unsuccessful hybrid hampered by unengaging writing.
Beer, the author of The Hampshire Project(2017), combines fictional tales with personal recollections to explore themes of marriage and infidelity.
The book opens with 16 short stories that describe relationships gone stale and tackle themes of temptation and betrayal. The opening work, “The Old Lies Are the Truth,” is about Harry, an elderly man whose wife is sent to a nursing home while he continues an affair with his mistress, Grace. When his daughter returns home, they’re both forced to confront old emotional scars as well as new wounds. In “Amy’s Arm,” two savagely competitive sisters lead very different lives but unexpectedly come together when one is injured in combat. In the timely “The Voyage,” a couple whose marriage is struggling take a cruise only for their ship to come under quarantine because of the Covid-19 outbreak. The stories are followed by Beer’s short memoir, which describes her growing up in New England as the privileged child of a Harvard academic, her time spent studying at Harvard and Cornell, her marriages and heartbreaks, and her finding a vocation as a writer. Readers may be surprised to find a collection of stories and a memoir in the same volume, but this bold decision may be an attempt by the author to show how her life shaped her work. And, indeed, it’s an interesting exercise to identify echoes of Beer’s past in her fiction. However, the two genres don’t sit well together; the memoir reads as an afterthought, characterized by hurried reflection: “My mom dies in 1987. Packing for the airport, my knees don’t work—I have to walk around with bent legs.” Overall, the emotional impact of key life events feels unnecessarily condensed. Similarly, Beer’s short stories, with few exceptions, flatly narrate their events: “they spent a lot of it in bed, at least at first. Luckily he was able to take Viagra, so that was great, but sometimes they just skipped it and invented new substitutes.” There are a few unpredictable plot twists and provocative love triangles, but they’re insufficient for truly compelling reading.
An unsuccessful hybrid hampered by unengaging writing.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-63210-096-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Plain View Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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