A flawed tale but the author’s devoted fans will devour it.
In de los Santos’ (I’ll Be Your Blue Sky, 2018, etc.) new melodrama, a woman’s perfect domestic life unravels when her husband becomes embroiled in a scandal and a terrible secret she has been keeping since high school threatens her relationship with her teenage daughter and her closest friends.
On an idyllic evening in June 1997, Zinny is a deliriously happy, free-spirited high schooler partying at the local quarry with her tight gang—Kirsten, CJ, and Gray (“The fantastic four. The forever four”)—along with her beloved brother, Trevor. Twenty years later, bold and brave Zinny has become sedate, suburban Ginny shopping for pricey heirloom tomatoes in a gourmet market when she learns of her husband Harris’ firing from his VP job at a pharmaceutical company, ostensibly for offering insider information to hush up his unseemly obsession with an 18-year-old intern named Cressida. From those opening chapters, the novel toggles between the diary kept by Zinny, which recounts how she withdrew from her friends after she discovered who set the school fire that killed Gray’s firefighter father, and Ginny’s first-person narrative of her attempts to protect her daughter, Avery, from Harris’ disgrace. While there are touching moments, especially in regard to Gray’s coming out as gay and the cruel bullying he receives, the protagonists are so flatly drawn that it’s hard to feel much empathy for their dilemmas; for example, eventual love interest Daniel, whom Ginny meets in the dog park, is introduced as a “very tall, thin man.” Obvious plot contrivances, clunky, cringeworthy descriptions (Gray’s laugh is described as “a cross between a guitar strum and hot toast with butter and honey”), and writerly dialogue that no human would ever speak also diminish the pleasure.
A flawed tale but the author’s devoted fans will devour it.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-284451-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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