Perfectly observed and tremendously moving: This will strike a resonant chord with parents everywhere.
Davies’ rigorously truthful examination of fatherhood explores the fallout from an abortion and the difficulties that follow a second pregnancy.
Prenatal tests suggest—but not conclusively—that something is very wrong with their unborn child, and an unnamed couple decides on an abortion. The next pregnancy proceeds normally until the baby turns blue on the delivery table and is whisked off to intensive care. Everything seems to be fine; their son comes home after four days, and they settle down to the sleep-deprived routine of life with an infant. But they panic when he cries, and when he does fall asleep, they stand outside his door listening to make sure he’s breathing. In a third-person narrative from the father’s point of view, Davies unsentimentally captures the mind-numbing tedium coupled with blinding love that new parents feel in prose as spare as it is emotionally resonant. When the boy’s preschool teacher “has concerns” even readers without children are likely to share the parents’ dread and anguish. The narrative moves briskly through key episodes: The son gets all kinds of physical and occupational therapy, the spouses go back to work (she’s at a university press, he’s a writer and teacher), their marriage is strained, the boy’s kindergarten teacher hints he might be autistic. His parents can’t bear to get him tested: “They’ve been afraid of tests for so long. All his life.” Their uncertainty over the abortion will never be resolved (references to Schrödinger’s cat abound), and the husband’s decision to volunteer as an escort at an abortion clinic infuriates his wife, who snarls, “You act like it happened to you!” It’s a tribute to Davies’ skill and sensitivity that we feel how much they still love each other despite bad sex, jealousies, and endless worry over their son. When they finally have him tested, the results are once again ambiguous, but they are learning to accept “his normal.” A radiant conclusion affirms the daunting cost and overwhelming rewards of raising a child.
Perfectly observed and tremendously moving: This will strike a resonant chord with parents everywhere.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-544-27771-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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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