Sensitive if not particularly subtle.
The youngest daughter of an Evangelical preacher–turned–reality TV star hatches a plan to wrangle her freedom—and expose the dark truth about her family—in Weir’s (Between Expectations, 2011) debut novel.
Esther Anne Hicks has spent her entire life in front of cameras: Six for Hicks is a Duggar-like American phenomenon, documenting the shiny, wholesome life of her parents and five siblings. So when Essie’s ruthlessly calculating mother finds out her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, it’s a matter to be discussed with the production office. She could abort, suggests production, or spend her pregnancy hiding out, off camera, in a villa on St. John and then give the baby up for adoption, although both of those are risky—there's always the possibility of someone finding out. The other option is marriage: They could stage a wedding, fast. And though she has no formal say in the matter, Essie has a candidate in mind: Roarke Richards, a senior at her high school and the only boy she knows who needs a way out as much as she does. With a wedding on the books, Essie enlists reporter Liberty Bell—who, in a previous life, was a high-profile hyperconservative teen blogger and who has family secrets of her own—to help sell their love story to America. And then, after the wedding, to help her seize the narrative and tell the real truth about her family. The question is: What cost is she willing to pay to tell it? The novel alternates between the perspectives of its three protagonists, though Essie, Roarke, and Liberty—while all deeply sympathetic—sound pretty much the same. But if the characters never quite have all the depth you might hope for, the well-paced plot is enough to keep the pages turning, and the unexpected tenderness between Essie and Roarke gives the novel genuine emotional punch.
Sensitive if not particularly subtle.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52031-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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