A dense but thoughtful and dramatic tale.
In Arginteanu’s novel, a teacher with brain cancer refuses treatment that will endanger her pregnancy.
Jane McCorvey is an educator at prestigious private school Coolidge Academy, and a former athlete in her 20s with plenty of liveliness and optimism. Then one of her second-grade students, Erin Gustino, has a terrible biking accident; she suffers a brain injury that requires emergency surgery. Fortunately, it’s successfully performed by neurosurgeon Mike Silvers. Later, Erin’s affluent parents, Paul and Kelly, worried that Erin hasn’t psychologically recovered from her trauma, recruit Jane to help restore their daughter’s confidence. Jane and Erin became genuinely close, and in the process, Jane meets Mike, who’s a talented but brashly impolitic person. One day, Jane is stricken with a massive seizure, and Mike traces it to incurable brain cancer. Jane also learns that she’s pregnant from a recent tryst in Venice, Italy; she interprets this as miraculous, as doctors have long told her she’s incapable of having children. Mike implores her to accept cancer treatment, as it could extend her life by several years, but all the options present possible threats to her fetus, so she refuses. It’s an extraordinary conundrum that Arginteanu delicately portrays; Mike is devoted to keeping her alive, and considers the fetus a “parasite,” but Jane sees it as a blessing and seems immune to persuasion. Overall, this is a complex tale that’s weighed down by unnecessary entanglements—there are simply too many interconnected relationships and subplots, many of which finally become exasperating distractions. That said, the main story is philosophically rich, but not in a tedious, academic way; there’s no hint of didacticism here. Instead, Arginteanu brings to life a moving story that tackles profound questions. It’s an engrossing tale that’s intellectually provocative and emotionally affecting.
A dense but thoughtful and dramatic tale.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Tomali Ventures
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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