by Lyn Liao Butler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 8, 2022
Weighty subject matter is undermined by a melodramatic, unfocused treatment.
A Taiwanese American woman is determined to adopt a Chinese orphan as a newly widowed single mother.
Tamlei Kwan, aka Tam, age 37, has vowed to follow through on her late husband Tony’s promise to adopt a Chinese toddler with special needs. Also, she’s recently taken responsibility for Angela, the 5-year-old daughter of Mia, whom Tony had presented, “vaguely,” as his first or second cousin. After emigrating from China, Mia lived with Tony and Tam in their Astoria apartment until her estrangement from the couple resulted in her exile to Flushing, where she worked in a nail salon. The cause of the rift is withheld until roughly midway through the novel in an unnecessary ploy to build suspense. Readers will guess early on that Tony and Mia’s relations aren’t exactly familial, especially since Mia’s perspective, in flashbacks, alternates with Tam’s. We learn that, in China, Mia was taken in by Tony’s parents and had a teenage crush on him. Thinking Mia is out of their lives, Tam experiences a double shock to learn that her husband and Mia have been killed by a careening truck in Flushing. What was Tony doing there? The fact that Mia’s stalker ex-boyfriend, Kenny, was either the driver or the passenger of the truck adds a foul-play element that proves to be a red herring. This unduly tortuous plot then turns to the most compelling portion of the novel—scenes from a Chinese orphanage where Tony’s dementia-afflicted elderly mother, Xing Xing, once played a pivotal role, whence Tony’s decision to adopt from that same orphanage. How the China-Taiwan conflict plays out on the family level is touched on but underdeveloped. The adoptee, Charlie, is 3 but physically and developmentally resembles a 9-month-old. The remainder of the novel deals with Tam’s attempts to turn her unruly, impromptu clan into a family. A kindly neighbor’s dachshund shelter provides comic relief and is more engaging than a hackneyed romance subplot.
Weighty subject matter is undermined by a melodramatic, unfocused treatment.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-19874-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Alison Espach ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 30, 2024
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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