A boisterous, stylish novel about fathers, sons, and the messiness of American life.
In Casey’s debut novel, a powerful city council member and his offspring separately attempt to atone for past mistakes.
Dan Hurley is a seasoned Chicago pol, educated at the foot of Ed O’Brien, the city’s long-serving Irish mayor, and his powerful friends in government. As a member of the city council, Dan became notorious for his work on behalf of the Democratic political machine, but as he reaches the end of his career, a dispute over a warehouse arises between the new mayor and a Westside minister. The situation presents Dan with an opportunity to possibly undo some of the cynical maneuvers that characterized his time in office. Meanwhile, Dan’s estranged son, Billy, is living a life of frustrated potential above a tavern in a small Wisconsin town, where he rents canoes to tourists. As he prepares for a new custody trial—with an aim to get back the children he lost due to his drug and alcohol abuse—Dan’s sudden death allows Billy to reevaluate his father and perhaps help to change the man’s legacy. Over the course of the novel, Casey proves himself to be intimately familiar with the ins and outs of Chicago politics. The first chapter, narrated by Dan, offers a particularly wonderful warts-and-all portrait of lawmaking: “So I’m in my chair, front and center, ringmaster in the Council chambers, the mayor presides, his minions atwitter, my aldermanic brethren lounge around and about me, in cushy red chairs with the city seal, cameras, red lights on, along the wall.” The prose is similarly, and remarkably, energetic throughout the remainder of the work. However, the plot loses some steam after it becomes Billy’s own story, and a length of 500-plus pages seems unnecessary. Even so, the novel, which is set in the mid-1980s, feels very much like an engaging artifact of that era, and after discovering it, readers will look forward to whatever future projects Casey has up his sleeve.
A boisterous, stylish novel about fathers, sons, and the messiness of American life.Pub Date: July 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-09-835623-1
Page Count: 476
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2022
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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