Medwed’s signature wit does not overcome the vapid, overly sanguine plot.
Mothers-in-law are the villains in the newest comedy from Massachusetts resident Medwed (How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life, 2006, etc.).
As the novel opens, narrator Maisie is trying to decide what to do with a container of frozen breast milk that has been left in her freezer. The milk belongs to ex-boyfriend lawyer Jack’s pro bono client Darlene, whose ex-mother-in-law is suing for custody of Darlene’s 15-month-old son. When Jack asks Maisie to hire Darlene as an assistant at her company, Factotum Inc., how can she refuse? After all, Maisie’s own marriage to Rex, heir to a frozen-chicken business, failed largely because Rex could not stand up to his overbearing mother, who has always been “Mrs. Pollock” to Maisie. Now Mrs. Pollock is trying to horn in on Maisie’s 16-year-old son Tommy. Maisie herself isn’t too crazy about Tommy’s new girlfriend September, especially when the kids announce that since September’s mother—a true no-good mom—has kicked her out, she’s moving in with Tommy and Maisie. Then Mrs. Pollock finds a baggie of mysterious white powder while searching Tommy’s backpack. At the hospital where Maisie takes the bag (the powder turns out to be gumdrop residue), she meets social worker Gabe. Gabe is a mama’s boy too, but luckily for Maisie, his mother is dead. Soon Maisie does some parenting of her own: She demands that September stay in school. September agrees. In fact, she embraces it, explaining that all she has ever wanted is a mother to give her advice. Meanwhile, Darlene is proving an excellent worker. At the custody hearing Maisie attends with Darlene to offer moral support, Darlene and her mother-in-law spar only briefly before finding common ground in their love for baby Anthony. The ease of resolution is as difficult to believe as Maisie’s attraction to bland Gabe.
Medwed’s signature wit does not overcome the vapid, overly sanguine plot.Pub Date: April 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-083121-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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