A good story in a great setting that will draw in readers.
A writer born and raised in Honolulu offers an insider’s perspective on Hawaii in a debut historical novel about a family that moves there before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the depths of the Depression, the Doyles—Sadira, aka Sadie, and Archie, and their sons, Lionel and Kenny—chafe against the limits of their small town in upstate New York. Tongues wag in Carlisle, mostly about Archie’s drinking. After one too many binges, he’s fired from his job but recommended for one in Hawaii. With high hopes the Doyles set sail in 1936 and find much good in paradise. Sadie snags a job as the society writer for the Honolulu Chronicle, and she is kept busy given that Honolulu is a favorite stop for celebrities and wannabes. But Archie can’t put the cork back in the bottle and squanders more than one opportunity. Kenny, a normal kid, is happy enough, but older brother Lionel is a sensitive (and perceptive) young man subject to wild mood swings. From alternating perspectives, Matthews shows daily life in Hawaii and the trauma of Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. An experienced writer and writing teacher, she ably tells her story through a dual point of view with some sections narrated by Sadie and some by Lionel. Lionel’s perspective is impressive, but in many ways he’s a typical high-drama teenager. Sadie enjoys the glamour of her job even while complaining about it. The Doyles’ story has some wonderfully realized characters, like Renee Manchester, who at first seems a classic floozie but who, readers learn, has much more to her. And the Doyles’ landlady, Mrs. Fong, is a paragon of tough love and wise counsel. But it’s Sadie who holds the family together and who at book’s end is battered but unbowed. Spanning the years from the influenza pandemic of 1918 until the aftermath of World War II in 1946, this story is a saga that earns its magnetism.
A good story in a great setting that will draw in readers.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-57869-091-6
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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