A little manipulative and a lot sentimental but sweet and charming enough that some readers won’t mind.
Gayle leaves lad lit behind in this sentimental novel about a lonely widower living in England.
Hubert Bird just wants to be left alone. The 84-year-old Jamaican man has been living in the U.K. for nearly six decades; now, scarred by a traumatic event that happened five years ago, he's withdrawn from his friends, choosing only to talk to his cat, Puss, and his daughter, Rose, a professor living in Australia whom he misses intensely. Rose worries about her father’s isolation, so much so that Hubert has invented a coterie of imaginary friends to assuage her concern, complete with backstories so elaborate that “he had to make a record in a notepad to help him keep track.” But when Rose announces she’s coming to visit, Hubert realizes he’s going to have to make some real-life friends, and fast. He turns to his neighbor Ashleigh, a young Welsh woman who’s tried to reach out to him before without success. Ashleigh manages to entice Hubert into joining a “Campaign to End Loneliness” in their London borough of Bromley. Hubert manages to make a lot of friends but still doesn’t know how he’s going to tell Rose that he lied to her for so long. The book goes back and forth between the present and the past, when the reader learns about Hubert’s arrival in England and his relationship with his late wife, Joyce, a White woman whose family disowned her for marrying a Black man. Gayle’s novel doesn’t exactly break new ground—the “grumpy old man who turns out to just be lonely” trope is well worn, and Gayle's prose is, for the most part, workmanlike. This novel is resolutely sentimental and ends with an unnecessary chapter that would have been better left out. But despite all that, Gayle’s book works for what it is, and that’s a testimony to the author’s charm and unfeigned sweetness—the reader can tell he cares a lot about Hubert, and his compassion is contagious.
A little manipulative and a lot sentimental but sweet and charming enough that some readers won’t mind.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-2016-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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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