An engaging tale about celebrity, love, and the search for one’s place in the world.
A newly famous woman attempts to seize control of her life in this comic novel.
Former actress BunnyLee Welles has just returned to Los Angeles for a wedding after four years bumming around Southeast Asia. Many of her old acquaintances have found success in Hollywood—Ted is a stand-up comedian and Rebekah, a TV news anchor. BunnyLee is experiencing fame of a different sort: A denture commercial she acted in years before has become an unlikely internet phenomenon, making her instantly recognizable. She’s now being stopped on the street, handed screenplays, and accosted for selfies. Looking to lay low, she seeks shelter at the compound of aging movie star and recent viral victim Buck LeGrande, whom she met playing tennis. Buck’s years-old altercation with a famous Muppet on Sesame Street has come roaring back with a vengeance so he’s sympathetic to BunnyLee’s plight. She is wary of Buck’s reputation—“a man who was famous for being a single man”—but soon their friendship gives rise to romantic tensions and jealousies. BunnyLee decides the time to leave has arrived, and she does so—in Buck’s vintage Mustang. She hits the road with her new dog, Puddles, and eventually crosses paths with a down-on-his-luck cowboy wrestler named Austin Sway. Can the various parties find the serenity they seek in the celebrity-obsessed American West? Temple’s prose is exact and full of color, capable of both madcap humor and wistful lyricism: “Austin thought again about the lovely bartender left behind, another face in a storyline of wistful memories of what might have been....Austin blew the Eldorado’s dual-trumpet horn, sounding like one of those locomotives that opened the West and drowned out the vast, untamed loneliness.” The characters are recognizable types—particularly Chinese cook Jimmy Chan, who treads uncomfortably into trope territory—and their stories are generally low stakes. Even so, the book’s buoyant energy and swift pacing will carry readers along. There’s a telegraphed sense of how everything will end up, but that doesn’t detract too much from the lighthearted journey.
An engaging tale about celebrity, love, and the search for one’s place in the world.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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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