Complex characters weigh the benefits of sacrificing their morals to achieve a lasting legacy in this well-told tale.
Father and daughter novelists with a strained relationship each struggle to realize their dreams.
In the wake of her mother Claire’s death, Isabelle Manning has a goal, and it’s a lofty one: publish a novel and make her esteemed novelist father, Ward, proud. But when Isabelle turns 35 and is no closer to being published, her goal begins to feel like a far-off dream: “Isabelle was the daughter of a real artist, a famous artist, and she was of him, his genetic material tucked deep in the fibers of her own DNA. It was difficult to exaggerate how exceptional it had felt to be the only child of a world-renowned writer. And how much it had fucked with her.” For his part, Ward does not seem concerned with Isabelle’s failure or particularly burdened by any sort of familial responsibility. Supplied with a hefty ego, Ward is more worried about not being able to finish another novel before he dies and how his fame will live on after him: “Ward felt a surge of melancholy that he would not get to read his own obituary, which he very much hoped would include the phrase ‘greatest novelist of our time’ with the absolute minimum number of modifiers.” Believing her father to be seriously ill, Isabelle’s desire to make Ward proud takes on a new urgency, and, when she discovers a gift her departed mother left her, Isabelle’s ethics start unraveling. The story is told by switching between the past and the present and through five voices—those of Isabelle; Ward; Claire; Isabelle’s on-again, off-again best friend, Brian; and a manuscript whose author is slowly revealed. In a novel largely about the creation of novels, McMullan Abramson avoids the pitfalls of jargony writing for the in-crowd and instead crafts a universal story about family, dreams, and the stories that linger long after we are gone.
Complex characters weigh the benefits of sacrificing their morals to achieve a lasting legacy in this well-told tale.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9924-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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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