A bittersweet selection of well-told L.A. stories, spanning gang lockups to movie-director mansions.
Harris’ story collection focuses on Los Angeles characters from all walks of life, shaken from their routines by startling chance encounters and unexpected relationships.
The author presents a collection of Los Angeles–centered short stories, typically involving a clash of personalities when characters come together (sometimes in a meaningful fashion, other times, well…). The title tale introduces Morris, a restless, middle-aged tax accountant who encounters Sofia, a rebellious teen from a privileged girls’ school, vandalizing luxury cars in retribution for climate change. Even though she considers him a class enemy, they somehow form a fragile bond (“Watching him leave, Sofia felt a hollow opening up inside her that she couldn’t explain. No other adults would let her speak to them the way she did to Morris”). Cary, the hard-luck protagonist of “The Cactus,” a washed-up athlete turned washed-up movie stuntman turned insurance man, finally meets his life mate in the person of an accident-case client, Sheila, who is particularly enchanted by an exotic flowering cactus he keeps. In “Doubles,” a divorced freelance writer and minor true-crime author is asked by a tennis partner for referrals on hoodlum types who can intervene in a sexual blackmail plot. Harris is not one for tidy endings in neat packages, leaving the reader hanging with tantalizing suggestions of what might happen next, as in “Mute,” in which a film director’s marriage disintegrates under the stress of raising an autistic child, or in “Chicken Soup,” with its battle of wills between an obstinate dowager and the undocumented Latinx woman hired as her caregiver. While the settings occasionally depict a Hollywood milieu of screenwriters, wannabe stars, and other creatives (the author is an established filmmaker), the material is not as arch as work by other chroniclers of Tinseltown, such as Bruce Wagner, Steve Martin, and Peter Lefcourt. Harris’ stories skew more broadly, recalling Raymond Carver’s and John Cheever’s vignettes of relatable people yearning for connection.
A bittersweet selection of well-told L.A. stories, spanning gang lockups to movie-director mansions.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781639889891
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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