An entertaining, deeply felt story of giddy hopes straining against harsh realities.
A down-in-the-dumps tour guide finds love while shepherding obstreperous clients across the Alps in McGregor’s mordant romance.
Depressed over his failing marriage, Joe Newhouse, a Munich-based expat American tour operator, books a gig conducting employees of the Portland video game company Luckspur on a meandering trip from Munich to Venice. The fractious group includes Rudy, the company’s domineering marketing chief; his secretary and girlfriend Sarah; their perpetually complaining coworker Felicity; and her kind, long-suffering husband Donald, the company’s lawyer. The one bright spot, from Joe’s perspective, is Tonia Gluck, the beautiful and charismatic wife of Luckspur’s owner Gerhard Gluck, who dropped out of the tour at the last minute. Joe drives the group south in his battered tour bus, stopping at off-beat hotels run by his hard-drinking cronies, the site of Adolf Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest retreat in Berchtesgaden, and a performance of Cosi Fan Tutte in Mozart’s hometown of Salzburg. The Luckspur employees complain about the callous, manipulative Gerhard and pick at each other over past antagonisms, but Joe’s disdain softens as he learns more about them. Joe and Tonia bond over art, poetry, and Ludwig II, the mad king of Bavaria; while touring his fairy-tale palace at Herrenchiemsee, Joe and Tonia begin a sexually adventurous affair. McGregor’s yarn features sharp-edged but complex characters who revel in European culture while approaching the open road as a pathway to liberation or a flight from responsibility. His smart, elegant prose sparkles as it evokes the tawdrier side of tourist glitz (“Worse still were the surly waitresses, their breasts popping out from worn-out dirndls, pretending they spoke only Bavarian while overcharging for beers”) but also conveys intense psychic extremes (“she threw her head back and laughed—a loud cackling laugh that made me think of hyenas on nature shows, their teeth reddened with entrails”). The result is a captivating exploration of the promise and burden of passionate love.
An entertaining, deeply felt story of giddy hopes straining against harsh realities.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781957024103
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Korza Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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