A satisfying story of love, family, and creativity.
Matthews’ novel tells the stories of two lives, mostly running in parallel but intersecting at key points.
Paul Rideau and Amy Barnes first connect briefly on a fall day in 1960 in Lisbon, Vermont, when he’s 9 and she’s 7. The Barnes family, from Hawaii, is visiting friends in the area. Then their lives diverge; he grows up on his family’s farm in Lisbon, while Amy, aside from a year in Connecticut, grows up in the Aloha State. In alternating sections following a nonlinear timeline spanning decades from 1960 to 2002, Matthews slowly reveals each character’s story. Paul marries his high school sweetheart, Sarah, and takes over the family farm, and theirs is a happy, busy life—with little room for Paul’s artistic interests. Amy is swept off her feet by Martin Whaley, a poet and faculty member at New Hampshire’s Stafford College; however, her creative writing is sublimated during their marriage, which is troubled. Throughout, Paul’s and Amy’s lives come close to connecting in various locations, including Chicago and Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Both experience milestones and painful events as their relationships with family members and friends develop and mature, and Paul and Amy’s love of artistic endeavors ends up changing both their lives. Overall, Matthews’ character-driven narrative sparkles with well-drawn protagonists and believable situations as Paul and Amy absorb society’s narrow expectations for men and women in the early ’60s. For example. Paul has an interest in art and color, but his father makes his opinion clear when his 9-year-old son is decorating Christmas cookies: “Coloring cookies when he could be out sledding? Seems pretty girly to me.” Tween Amy’s teacher tells her to cover up her body as much as possible in public: “You’ll be telling the boys you’re not the kind of girl who welcomes crude remarks and inappropriate attention.” In the end, this rewarding story successfully weaves disparate perspectives into a rich braid.
A satisfying story of love, family, and creativity.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781578691623
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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