Krügel knows her way around both the salty and sweet of marriage and motherhood.
A woman juggles domestic calamities while trying to avoid a more serious crisis in German author Krügel's first novel to be translated into English.
Katharina lives near Lübeck on Germany’s Baltic coast, but her tone of wryly comic exasperation closely resembles that of popular frazzled working-mother heroines from Britain, Australia, and the U.S. A part-time music teacher, Katharina has been carrying most of the responsibility for care of her household and two children—Helli, a stubborn and emotionally chaotic 11-year-old recently diagnosed with ADHD, and 17-year-old Alex, whose joyful immersion in musical theater feels to his classically trained mother like rebellion—ever since economic necessity forced her architect husband, Costas, to take a job in Berlin. For more than a year he has come home only on weekends, a situation she understands yet resents. This weekend he’s staying in Berlin for his office Christmas party, and Katharina has declined an invitation to join him. Instead she’s planned her first visit in 15 years from musician and former flatmate Kilian, her platonic best friend before she met Costas. But the day goes awry early when Katharina must collect Helli from school after one of the girl's explosive, semi-intentional nosebleeds. Various crises follow. Katharina helps her neighbors Theo and Heinz search for the thumb Theo’s cut off while tinkering with the lawnmower. Alex—whom Katharina thought was gay—introduces his annoyingly perfect girlfriend. Helli has a major meltdown on horseback. Katharina’s musician sister demands help with her failing love life. Katharina gets dangerously drunk with Kilian. The pet rats escape. It all reads like a domestic romp except for the darker fears and regrets that Katharina can't quite escape, like a third baby in her past or the fact that she’s yet to make a doctor’s appointment or tell Costas about the lump she’s found in her breast.
Krügel knows her way around both the salty and sweet of marriage and motherhood.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-925603-35-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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