A delightfully meta novel about a woman writing her way out of calamity.
A would-be biographer pursues two potential paydays in Upton’s comic novel.
Tabitha Acrete is 50, divorced, and in need of some cash. She’s a biographer by trade, and though her last effort—Annie: Her Life Story, about her deceased dog—was a flop, she has two prospective subjects whom she hopes will rejuvenate her career. One is Brent Vintner, an actor “so good looking they should bottle that man and spray him on belligerent people as a form of crowd control.” The other is Piper Fields, a renowned children’s book author whose career has taken a hit since the discovery that she writes erotic novels on the side. Both Brent and Piper happen to be in Tabitha’s hometown of Midlothian for the next several months, which should give Tabitha plenty of time to pry into the recesses of their private lives. The only problem is that Tabitha’s past celebrity profiles were so poorly received that she’s basically blacklisted—a fact that she misrepresents to her publisher. As Tabitha attempts, with mixed results, to worm her way into the lives of Brent and Piper, she also grapples with the legacy of her deceased ex-husband’s ashes, the colorful patrons of her nephew Leon’s bar (called The End of the World), an unwanted intern, and the fact that she might not be a very good biographer at all. Upton’s prose is razor-sharp—as filtered through the unpredictable and slightly delusional perspective of Tabitha, it takes on a magical, frenetic quality. Here, Tabitha tries to justify why a biographer isn’t really a writer: “As a biographer I’m ferreting out truth, outlining a life until the contours are visible. It never feels like writing to me. I’m not inventing anything. I’m releasing a life, clarifying a life. I’m more like a painter or a photographer than a writer. I hardly even work in—in—words.” Though many madcap events occur, it’s Tabitha’s humorous and hypnotic voice that propels the story.
A delightfully meta novel about a woman writing her way out of calamity.Pub Date: May 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781952386893
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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