A beautiful, honest, and often funny look at loneliness and the courage it takes to simply keep going.
When a friendless office worker inadvertently finds herself able to read her co-workers’ emails, she hatches a plan to become a star employee.
Jolene Smith doesn’t fit in at work. She doesn’t socialize with her co-workers or even engage in small talk—in fact, she’s pretty sure they’re all making fun of her behind her back. Jolene takes out her frustration by writing her real thoughts (“Deep in my core, I find you insufferable”) at the end of her emails in white text, so they’re invisible to the recipients—but when she forgets to change the text color in a diatribe against a co-worker who microwaved an especially smelly lunch, she gets caught. She’s forced to attend an anti-harassment course with the new HR guy, Clifford. Jolene is humiliated, especially when Cliff sets up new security measures on her computer. But Jolene quickly notices that there’s an unintended consequence to the changes—now she’s able to read everyone’s emails and messages. She can see the terrible things her co-workers are saying about her from the safety of their keyboards…but she can also gather intel that could help her improve her performance. With her insider knowledge, Jolene is able to do better work and start connecting with her colleagues for the first time. She also starts to realize that Cliff the HR guy is very nice—even if he is very off-limits. As Jolene gets to know her co-workers better, she sees that they all have their secret heartbreaks and struggles, just like her. But will she be able to let people see the real Jolene? In her debut, Sue creates a vivid portrait of a truly lonely, heartbroken woman. Anyone who has worked in an office will appreciate the level of detail Sue uses to describe the experience—the particular bleakness of a sad office party, the petty gossip, the alliances and enmities. Jolene starts out afraid of connection and unable to view her coworkers as anything other than adversaries. It’s immensely satisfying to see her accept that other people might actually like her, if only she has the courage to be known.
A beautiful, honest, and often funny look at loneliness and the courage it takes to simply keep going.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780063320369
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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