An original and potent comedy of manners with an ingenious final twist.
When a well-to-do British Nigerian couple and the wife's best friend drink way too much wine and whiskey, the fraught triangle of their relationship falls apart.
Agbaje-Williams' striking, often wickedly funny debut is set over the course of one day, divided into three sections. The first is narrated by a married woman whose lifelong best friend, Temi, arrives at her house at noon with wine, chips, and cigarettes. The two hang out and deconstruct Temi's recent dates; we learn that the wife and her husband have begun trying to get pregnant and that Temi sees this as a betrayal. Temi and the husband hate each other and always have. As the day progresses into evening, the second section of the book is told by the husband, the third by Temi. Agbaje-Williams brilliantly captures the inner monologue as well as the conversational style of each of the three, through which their whole cultural milieu takes shape around them, from the expectations of their Nigerian parents to their Smeg fridge and Tesco wine. The husband's section is the funniest as he rages in his head against his wife's friendship with Temi and recalls the history of insults he has endured. But whenever he complains about anything, like the fact that Temi has broken into a special bottle of wine he was saving, his wife says “Kim, there's people that are dying,” a Kardashian reference that he internalizes. “The thought that my wife’s friend was now privy even to our private text messages repulsed and enraged me. I quoted the Kardashians three times like a prayer then resolved to move past the situation for my own sanity and to avoid prison.” The last section is narrated by Temi, whose extreme ideas about men, women, and marriage allow her to rationalize her destructive behavior. As she and the husband move from passive-aggressive sniping to acts of war, as the empty bottles pile up in the recycling, she hatches an evil plan. With three unlikable, unreliable narrators, and with both patriarchal arrangements and feminist alternatives depicted as self-serving transactions, Agbaje-Williams throws caution to the wind and pulls off a surprise win.
An original and potent comedy of manners with an ingenious final twist.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780593540718
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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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