A wonderfully shrewd, surreal, and comical odyssey through a crumbling American landscape.
Two peculiar sisters navigate the pain and beauty of growing up in rural America.
In the 1980s, Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised by parents Henry and Sylvia on an Illinois farm. The backdrop is rather mundane, but the family is anything but. Henry and Sylvia, sexually affectionate to a fault, spend much of their time in the throes of passion while their daughters pore over books of ancient mythology, feminist philosophy, and other esoterica. They refer to themselves as “junk kids” and partake in strange intellectual rituals “just as the classics had taught us to do.” Jo, the elder sister, was born “a nine-pound skeptic,” prone to rebelling against anything and everything. She speaks in an unusually erudite manner, spouting baroque truisms—“We are surrounded by America with its orgies of barbarism”—in between mental breakdowns and general hell-raising. Bernie, meanwhile, yearns to escape the suffocating poverty of the rural Midwest but only ends up a moderate distance away, at a university in Chicago. In spite of her attempts to sever her past (and the ever-present threat of mental illness, which has plagued so many Fareown women before her), she notes, “I would never escape the web that was my family. I would never break from that group of individuals facsimiled for America.” Her aching to understand herself, her family history, and, of course, her beloved sister takes her across the country, a mystical and darkly humorous voyage rife with bizarre interactions and apt cultural references. Lange’s debut novel is a refreshingly sardonic take on the decaying ideal of the American dream, with an anti-capitalist tilt. At the end of it all, this is not just a brilliant bildungsroman: Like the classics that the Fareown sisters quote ad infinitum, it’s a lush, uncanny mythology itself.
A wonderfully shrewd, surreal, and comical odyssey through a crumbling American landscape.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781953387516
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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