Sweet and safe.
After graduating from business school at UC Berkeley, a bright young woman on her way to a job in Manhattan finance takes a major detour at a Sonoma winery.
"I would never have predicted that a winery could change my life. But when I walked into the empty tasting room at Bellosguardo on the first weekend in May of my thirtieth year, a feeling came over me. The kind you get when you taste a new food for the first time and you know it will be your favorite, or when you see a guy across the bookstore and you know he'll be your new boyfriend." Some readers will feel immediate concern upon reading the first three sentences of publishing exec Parker's debut, regardless of whether they are familiar with the kind of serendipitous premonition narrator Hannah Greene has just described. The problem is, that's an awful lot of plot to give away in the first few sentences of a novel. The only hope at this point is that ensuing events are going to prove Hannah totally mistaken. Because if we already know that she's about to change the whole course of her life and that it's all going to work out brilliantly...that's a problem. Unfortunately, nothing that threatens to put any kind of serious crimp in her unfolding success and happiness will be allowed to interfere. The predictability of the storyline might have been offset if the Sonoma setting provided a showcase for serious wine and food writing. But this book has more to teach about the uses of social media for marketing than it does anything else. There's also quite a lot of focus on details of not-very-interesting clothes and makeup. When she bursts in on her boss getting dressed for a party, Hannah finds her in a slip and kitten heels. " 'You look great so far,' I said. She did. The slip was slimming and she'd already put on makeup. It looked like she knew how to contour." There is never the slightest danger of everything not working out perfectly, and these people are nowhere near interesting enough to have a whole book written about them.
Sweet and safe.Pub Date: July 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4186-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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