A tale with an intriguing setup that doesn’t fulfill its promise.
A group of people must contend with their inner demons as they navigate trauma in Oliveri’s novel.
Oliveri’s story, told through multiple characters’ perspectives, focuses on their negative inner voices: the “monsters” that fill them with self-doubt, prey on their insecurities, or convince them to act poorly—and effectively turn them into the worst possible versions of themselves. Michael Conifer is the new kid in a suburban Colorado high school; he’s a bit nerdy, and he’s at war with an inner monster named Beel, who makes him believe that he has little value as a person. Michael has a crush on Rachel Kalopoulos, a girl who spends most of her time smoking cannabis and avoiding her father, John, a wealthy cannabis grower and seller; he’s in talks to work with Lorne Conifer, Michael’s father, who’s running for mayor. Lorne is portrayed as a truly vile person whose inner voice, Carmen, gives him permission to be absolutely awful to everyone, particularly his wife, Michelle. What Lorne doesn’t know, however, is that Michelle’s unnamed inner voice has been making plans to kill him. The conflicts all come to a head after Michael tries to smoke cannabis for the first time with Rachel. When Lorne learns that his son has tried drugs, he flies into a violent rage. Later, while Michael is at the Greenwood Center—a rehabilitation facility where he was sent as a punishment—Michelle calls him to tell him some shocking, life-altering news, which later yields other surprising plot developments.
Oliveri’s tale is an ambitious one, making a bold attempt to present an examination of how inner voices can cause people to go down harmful paths. Although the overall premise of the novel is compelling, the author’s execution works against it. The inclusion of multiple characters’ points of view highlights the many different ways that inner voices can affect people, but having so many disparate perspectives makes the work feel cluttered; for example, Ms. Shelgren, Michael’s math teacher, doesn’t have a compelling arc and does little to serve or progress the story. Also, because each of the main players is essentially dealing with a similar issue—a negative and ultimately unhelpful force that keeps them from being kind, moral, or brave—the prose inevitably begins to feel repetitive. Oliveri’s plot is strongest when it emphasizes the characters’ emotional states, as in its portrayal of Rachel’s strained relationship with her father or Michael’s examination of his own trauma: “They were permacuts—paper-thin incisions that I felt deeply every time he [Lorne] ignored me, traded me in, left me out.” Yet even in these moments, useful exposition is often set aside in favor of quips from inner voices. Though the chapters from the perspective of “the monster” are meant to be menacing—particularly when the all-knowing being addresses the reader directly—they often come off as overwrought and repetitive. Oliveri’s story is certainly enthusiastic in its telling. However, it could have used some fine-tuning to make it more consistently engaging.
A tale with an intriguing setup that doesn’t fulfill its promise.Pub Date: March 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781088108420
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2023
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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