A realistic, if sometimes-frustrating, portrayal of couples facing emotional crises.
A divorce ripples through a close-knit group of friends in Palmer’s latest novel.
Three couples in fictional River Mill, Massachusetts—Mickey and Mateo, Abe and Amy, and Louisa and Nathan—have a 10-year tradition of gathering for each person’s birthday at an Italian restaurant.At this year’s dinner,on Nathan’s 40th birthday, he tells Louisa that he wants a divorce, which blindsides her. It turns out that Nathan, a college professor, is having an affair with one of his students. As his and Louisa’s marriage falls apart, their friends begin to reevaluate their own relationships. Amy and her husband, Abe, are having fertility issues, and although he can’t wait to be a father, she isn’t sure that she wants kids at all. She struggles with guilt as she loves Abe but doesn’t feel that she can give him everything he wants. Mickey and Mateo’s relationship is having trouble because they have mismatched libidos; Mickey pitches the idea of attempting an open marriage, which seems to work, at first, but gets complicated when their teenage daughter finds out about the arrangement. The opening sections of the novel are a bit confusing, as Palmer presents all six characters and their issues at once, from various points of view. Most of the book, however, focuses on the fallout from Nathan and Louisa’s split and how it not only affects their friends, but also their careers. Nathan acts in an appalling way, tying himself in knots to justify his affair; it makes it difficult to sympathize with him, and it’s unclear here the story’s sympathies lie. Louisa, meanwhile, faces condescension, not only from Nathan but also from her boss. But although some of the major and minor characters are distinctly unlikable, the complex story does feel true to life. Not all of the relationships survive, but their resolutions all feel authentic to the characters.
A realistic, if sometimes-frustrating, portrayal of couples facing emotional crises.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-954332-32-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2022
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
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
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