Not the strongest of the series.
Jen Dixon is now a caregiving grandma, a classroom parent, a PTA fundraiser, and a spin instructor—Stay in the saddle, riders!
We met the irresistibly snarky Jen as a kindergarten parent in Gelman's debut, Class Mom (2017), and caught up with her in third grade in You've Been Volunteered (2019). As our 53-year-old heroine's son enters fifth grade, Gelman's comic style has gotten a wee bit cramped—for one thing, she's already made a lot of the possible jokes about riding herd on the other parents, but also the mores of 2021 have taken some of the teeth out of her comedy. She can still do jokes about spelt-spirulina pretzels and gluten-free cookies; when Jen takes care of her daughter Viv's out-of-wedlock 2-year-old three days a week, she learns that "everything I did for [Viv] as a child has caused adult-onset you-name-it," resulting in a "parenting style that can best be described as a cross between Mary Poppins and the surgeon general." On the other hand, great care must be taken not to offend anyone, removing a lot of comic potential. Gelman confesses in her acknowledgments that her editor had "the unfortunate job of telling me over and over again, 'You can't say things like that anymore.' " Honestly, you can tell, though the struggle to tamp down the inappropriate didn't quite succeed in this amusing sentence: "My parents' possible dementia is nothing to laugh about, but the people in the basement have become a scapegoat for everything from who ate the last cookie to who killed JonBenét Ramsey." What's added to fill the void is way, way too much spin class. Do Gelman's readers really want to hear so much about Jen's vigorous exercise program, including 6:30 p.m. yoga classes and insights like "I have discovered that yoga is a great counter-workout to spinning, which has a tendency to tighten up my legs and hip flexors"? Let's hope that middle school gives Jen more room to breathe.
Not the strongest of the series.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-77757-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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