An often charming and funny coming-of-age tale.
Garvin (A Faithful Son, 2016) tells the story of a 13-year-old orphan sent to live with her forthright great-aunt in this novel.
When Poppy Wainwright’s grandmother dies, she travels from her home in Arkansas to live with her grandmother’s older sister, Sookie, in Savannah, Georgia. “Your Grandma Lainey was a self-righteous nit-wit,” Sookie tells Poppy upon their first meeting, “and if I had the gumption, I’d drive myself up to Mountain Home and spit on her freshly dug grave.” Sookie is everything Poppy’s grandmother was not: atheistic, slovenly, suspicious, prone to vendettas, and completely lacking any verbal filter. Yet there’s much that this foulmouthed, long-lived woman has to teach young Sookie about the world and how to be a woman in it. Sookie initially warns Poppy away from the locals—particularly the neighbor boys, with whom the old woman participates in an ongoing feud. Poppy manages to befriend Donita Pendergast, a young woman from church. As Poppy and Sookie become involved with Donita’s fraught relationship with her husband, Poppy learns some things about her own troubled family history from her great aunt—including some insight into how Sookie became so cynical. Following two women at either end of life, this novel is a fine submission in the long tradition of Southern bildungsromans. Garvin animates his characters with wonderfully vulgar dialogue, and he isn’t afraid to turn the reader’s stomach just a bit with his physical descriptions; for example, he makes sure to include the detail that “Yellow cataracts blanketed [Sookie’s] eyes, like two blue marbles coated by lemon custard.” The author also manages to tackle serious issues of sexuality and domestic violence while keeping the book lighthearted and highly readable. If he errs, it’s in his maximalism: the book feels bloated at more than 350 pages, in part due to the fact that he provides some pieces of information three or four times—usually, it seems, because he simply can’t decide which phrasing he likes best. Some readers may also find the tone too cute by half, but others who subscribe to Garvin’s larger-than-life vision won’t want it to end.
An often charming and funny coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: July 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5455-6872-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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