Riveting family saga with themes of female empowerment creatively tied to tarot lore.
In parallel narratives spanning a century, a woman and her great-grandmother grapple with generational trauma through their interpretations of a tarot deck.
The narrative begins with a traumatic scene of sexual assault. The survivor is Wanda Justice, a 17-year-old girl raised by her single mother in small-town Alberta, Canada. She burns down the abandoned church where the rape took place, enacting the novel’s title for the first of many times. Cut to 1916 in Scotland, where another sexual assault occurs, this time of Sheena Firth. As a result of the assault, Sheena becomes pregnant with Sadie, Wanda’s great-grandmother. Jumping forward to 1999, Wanda struggles with the aftermath of her own assault. The novel also charts Sadie’s travels as she makes her way from the farm where her mother was raised in Scotland to her present-day home in Canada. Both Wanda and Sadie are comforted by the introduction of tarot into their lives. Using their intuitive powers, they’re able to self-reflect on their decisions and prepare for coming difficulties. For example, the cards alert each of them to future problems with the men in their lives. The novel is entrenched in tarot lore; the 22 chapters correspond to the cards of the major arcana, the named cards in a standard tarot deck (the Empress, the Fool, etc.). Representing the trauma and resilience passed down from Sheena to each of her descendants, the women pass a tarot deck from mother to daughter. Coulter provides each character with a distinct voice, preventing confusion despite shifting chronology. Although the linking of Sheena’s trauma to that of her descendants is occasionally heavy-handed, as when Sadie says that Sheena’s “trauma belongs to all of us,” still the theme of women empowering women makes for a timely, poignant novel with shades of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing (2018) and Miriam Toews’ Women Talking (2018).
Riveting family saga with themes of female empowerment creatively tied to tarot lore.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781039166943
Page Count: 299
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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