A touching story about the themes that resonate through centuries.
A woman’s attempts to uncover an archaeological mystery lead to a bigger discovery: herself.
Hannah Larson and her 9-year-old son, Nicky, have packed up their Upper West Side bags and moved into Ashton Hall, a stately manor near Cambridge, England. They were intending to keep Christopher, Hannah’s honorary uncle, company while he undergoes cancer treatment, but unbeknownst to Hannah, he has made other plans to get care in New York City. Thus Hannah has Christopher’s apartment to herself, as well as the time and space to work on her long-put-aside dissertation and to contemplate her husband’s betrayals. That is until Nicky, a quirky child with troubling outbursts of violence, makes a shocking discovery: Hidden away in an enclosed room in the walls of Ashton Hall is a redheaded skeleton. A team of archaeologists descend on the manor to learn more about the skeleton, whom they discover lived in the 1500s and is named Isabella Cresham: “Isabella Cresham has never been a ghost, haunting us,” one of the manor's other residents says to Hannah. “Tells you something about ghosts. If you don’t fear their presence, they leave you alone. We’ll see if she starts haunting us now.” Hannah, clearly haunted from the moment she lays eyes on Isabella, begins to see parallels between their lives as she deals with the nagging question: Did Isabella choose this life, or was she locked away? Hannah pours over Isabella’s sketchbooks and letters, piecing together Isabella’s life while interweaving her own anxieties and dreams into Isabella’s story. The first third of the book drags, and somehow the discovery of a skeleton in a hidden room is the least compelling part of the entire novel. That said, its strength comes from the archaeological details (did you know that the pigment that creates red hair is the slowest to break down?) as well as the grace and attention given to both Hannah and Isabella—two women separated by hundreds of years but bound by a common humanity.
A touching story about the themes that resonate through centuries.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35949-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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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