Curiously light, an herbal teacup of the grim horrors drunk by the gallon by predecessors long ago.
First-novelist Dugain’s return to WWI, winner of the Prix des Libraires, offers quietly extended moments of seeming authenticity, then ends not in ashes but in soap.
In 1914, Adrian Fournier is 24, a civil engineer—and an officer. In his first day at the front, before the fighting has really even begun, he’s told to scout for locations along the Meuse where bridges can be built—but he doesn’t get far. Just as he’s gotten off his horse, the two men with him are killed and he himself is wounded hideously, never having even seen the enemy. His injury is “maxillofacial,” a wound to the face—or, more exactly, the loss of the whole center part of his face. He becomes the first patient in the wing of the Val de Grâce military hospital set aside for officers with this dreadful type of wound. There he’ll stay for the duration, in fact until April of 1919, undergoing a total of 16 operations (though his face “still did not look human”) and pondering how to go on with life afterward. As the ward fills, he becomes a kind of respected senior figure along with two others—Weil and Penanster—who remain patients as long as he does and with whom he becomes lifelong friends. There’s a woman in the picture also—Fournier met her only once, the night before he went to the front. Will she remember him? Will his appalling wound make love impossible? Weil counsels that sexual love is over for men with wounds like theirs—but could he be wrong? The love melodrama, though, poses fewer troubles for the reader than does the inexplicable good cheer of these ruined men, fêted by the state apparatus that even now still hasn’t embittered them (“It was a great day, and I came away convinced that this had indeed been the war to end all wars”).
Curiously light, an herbal teacup of the grim horrors drunk by the gallon by predecessors long ago.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-265-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
