Wry, sharp, charming, resistant to neat closures and easy turns—a debut of enormous promise.
The witty, fiercely intelligent story of a young alcoholic in the fragile early days of sobriety, suspended between addiction and whatever life might come next—the shape of which he can’t yet see.
Twenty-six-year-old Dennis Monk, just months sober, gets the boot from his parents’ suburban Philadelphia home and begins what will be, over the novel’s episodic chapters, a half-year odyssey as the serial houseguest of relatives, old flames, and running buddies from high school and college. Dennis jumps from makeshift situation to awkward makeshift situation (pushed-together couches he hopes won’t get sold out from under him, cots in basements alongside washing machines) all over a rapidly gentrifying Philadelphia filled with his only-marginally-less-lost peers. Sometimes he’s a freeloader; sometimes he earns his keep, sort of, through errands not always handled successfully, projects he can fake his way through, or fitful employment. Dennis is nimble-tongued and keenly observant, and the book offers all sorts of humorous delights. Yet the reader quickly sees, too, that irony is Dennis’ protective coloration, that his wit is anxious and self-preserving. He may not be a gentrifier, but he is a kind of hipster who, like his coevals, simply wants to cobble together, from the unpromising materials available, an identity he can live in. Beneath the world weariness and sarcasm we get glimpses (for instance, in the bit-by-bit-revealed story of a friend who died from drinking) of a sweetness and vulnerability, even a fragile hopefulness, that Dennis is at pains to hide and resist. This is less a traditional novel than a linked collection of stories, a serial picaresque, but ultimately that approach feels like the right one for a book about navigating—or maybe just drifting through, in search of some useful piece of flotsam to grab hold of—a limbo of one’s own making. As a starting point for a new life, “non-drinker” is a necessary condition...but by itself that datum doesn’t get one very far. The book ends with Dennis, one year sober, on the verge of—well, who knows what, but verges beat sloughs every day.
Wry, sharp, charming, resistant to neat closures and easy turns—a debut of enormous promise.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781662602245
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
