A touching intergenerational romp through the coastal South.
Fed up with college, a student embarks on a road trip to find her missing best friend with an unlikely co-pilot—her grandmother—in this debut novel.
Believing she’ll never make it as a fashion designer and reeling from the news that her lab partner crush has just started dating one of her friends, Eve Prince is flailing in college. She reaches out to her best friend and cousin, Ally, for support. But Ally’s response is cryptic, stating she is in “big trouble” and “gonna disappear for a while.” Eve is able to decipher Ally’s location from her letter and asks her grandmother Boop if she can borrow her car to go to the family beach house in Virginia. Eve is surprised when Boop agrees on one condition—that she accompany her. What follows is a heartwarming trek through the South as grandmother and granddaughter uncover secrets held for generations as well as confront family issues, all while having a little fun. The relationship between Boop and Eve is the most appealing part of Sheriff’s novel. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things going on in the plot, causing some confusion for readers. There is a distracting subplot that involves a character named Danielle Grusky, who takes over her husband’s private investigation firm after he is injured in a car accident. Hired by Boop’s sister, Victoria Liddel, Danielle follows Eve and her grandmother on their trip to discover Ally’s whereabouts. Characters tend to pop in and out of the narrative, like Zed, a good-looking cop who pulls Eve and Boop over and ends up inviting the young woman to surf with him. The central point of the story seems to be about mental illness and how it can affect generations, as Boop tells Eve: “This world we live in ain’t real sympathetic ’bout mental illnesses....Seems to me we’d all be a little less nuts if we spent our energy dealing with our crazy instead of hiding it.” With the help of her grandmother, who also has experienced depression, Eve uses the trip to pull herself out of the funk she grappled with in college. The book would have benefitted from the inclusion of a family tree for easy reference as well as a map of the two women’s route, as it’s difficult to keep track of their whereabouts along the way.
A touching intergenerational romp through the coastal South.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-763-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2020
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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