Like the many cocktails sipped by our discerning narrator: effervescent, tart, and intoxicating.
A pair of beautiful, undocumented party girls live the high life in New York...though they literally do not know where their next meal is coming from.
As this glamorous, intelligent debut novel opens, 21-year-old best friends Isa and Gala land in New York to spend the summer. They plan to use their pretty faces as passports to the New York demimonde and to make grocery money by selling dresses at a market stall. Since the latter turns out to be quite the losing operation, they are constantly looking for gigs that pay cash. As audience members at a TV shoot, they "only get fifty dollars each, but collectively, that's at least one late-night cab home, a dozen oysters during happy hour, a small bottle of Tanqueray, and maybe one unlimited seven-day MetroCard." They respond to ads looking for foot models and makeup shoots, one seeking "a pair of friends, one of whom had to be Diverse." ("Diverse" is about all we ever really know about Isa's background; Gala, we learn in a throwaway remark, was a Bosnian baby refugee.) Being members of what one acquaintance calls the "precariat" can be exhausting. When the girls try to improve their minds by attending a boring lecture on the new Belle Epoque touted in the New Yorker, Gala wonders, "Do you think they have a list of who's in the One Percent?" It would certainly make things more efficient. The book, Isa's putative diary, is chock-full of aperçus. On the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn: "Being far away from a subway station must be conducive to making art." On a typical New York conversation: “two people waiting for their turn to talk.” On the aloof brutes Isa's always fallen for: "The mind reels with all the possibilities of what they might feel or think about you. Usually it is nothing like what you expect and much less complex than the thoughts you generously assign to them." The girls have known each other since they were at least 16 (that's when Isa spent six months living in Gala's bedroom and Gala got her tooth knocked out at a rave), but this summer will test their friendship and propel them into their next chapters.
Like the many cocktails sipped by our discerning narrator: effervescent, tart, and intoxicating.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-83976-4-011
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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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