A piercing and infuriating tale that brings to light a historical cruelty too often kept secret.
In Fewer’s historical novel, an Irish family contends with the difficulties of immigration, early-20th-century medical misogyny, and broken dreams.
Brigid Kelly was once a lively, self-confident child who relished tending to her younger siblings in the small Irish town of Moling. But in 1892, when Brigid was 6 years old, the birth of Thomas, the family’s fourth child, brought about the tragic death of Brigid’s mother (“all light had been sucked from their warm, loving home and replaced with individual struggles to exist”). Five years later, Brigid’s father Patrick buckles to social pressure and marries Agnes O’Brien, a stern woman who rules the house and the children with an iron fist. Brigid, desiring a life larger than is available in their little village, decides she must find a way to leave. Opportunity comes in the form of Ben McCarthy, a local lad who shares Brigid’s aspirations of starting over in America. The two marry in 1908, and, with Brigid’s brother James in tow, they sail to New York. Brigid and Ben settle in Niagara Falls while James plants his roots in San Francisco. When Brigid becomes involved with a group of spiritualists, free thinkers, and suffragettes, she is shunned by the church, and the resulting loss of social position causes Ben to lose his job. The author alternates between stories of the siblings left in Ireland and those of the three immigrants, but it is Brigid’s painful tale of hope, determination, and an eventual mental unraveling that drives the narrative. The strongest of the four Kelly children, she is undone by a series of tragedies that are exacerbated by the era’s accepted medical mistreatment by a misogynistic doctor. With a sharp eye for detail, Fewer treats her readers to enjoyably lavish depictions of upper-class travel across the Atlantic and a portrait of San Francisco’s bustling rebirth after the famous earthquake; she applies the same meticulous attention to the frightening isolation of Brigid’s life in a mental institution.
A piercing and infuriating tale that brings to light a historical cruelty too often kept secret.Pub Date: March 12, 2025
ISBN: 9798888246078
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2025
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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