A deftly rendered novel about reconnecting with one’s true self.
In Graham’s novel, a media executive confronts her idealistic younger self with the help of her college friends.
Everleigh “Ev” Page has made plenty of compromises to get where she is. As the executive producer of Breaking, a long-running news magazine show, she’s been forced to adapt to the changing media landscape. When her boss tells her she needs to shrink her workforce, fire talented reporters, or kill a story, she complies. When her workaholic schedule keeps her from fully integrating into her boyfriend Sean’s extended family, she takes the hit to her personal life. These are the sacrifices it takes to become president of the news division—a position that no woman has ever held…yet. Strange things begin to happen, however, when Ev returns to upstate New York for a college reunion—or “Recommitment,” to use the terminology of Foster House, the Suffragette-themed sorority she shared with 11 other girls during her studies. Recommitment is shrouded in secrecy, due in part to Dr. Long, the house’s potion-mixing Indigenous landlord, and Ev isn’t thrilled to be taking part. Returning to Foster House means facing her long-estranged former sisters as well as, metaphorically speaking, “Leigh,” the 19-year-old crusading student journalist she used to be—but Ev has no idea how literal that reunion is about to become. Graham, a writer for Dateline, clearly knows the world of television news—the network offices feel just as authentically lived-in as the ancient banisters and wallpaper of Foster House. Here, she describes Ev’s workplace with typical precise prose: “It’s saved from total corporate blandness by the wainscoting she had put in with the decorating money that came with her promotion to EP. She actually went a little over budget and had to pay some out of her own pocket but it was worth it.” The reunion material manages to weave a bit of the unexpected—even the supernatural—into the familiar narrative of a woman selling her soul to join the corporate boys’ club.
A deftly rendered novel about reconnecting with one’s true self.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9781647429027
Page Count: 328
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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