A scientifically intriguing, dramatic, and challenging read.
A historical novel that traces three generations of a New York family involved in a paleontological discovery.
In 1917, there was a great celebration to honor the opening of the Central Park Reservoir, which received its water from a dammed lake that flooded the Catskills village of Gilboa. Wheelwright’s novel begins in 1993, when the city is decommissioning that same reservoir. Piedmont Livingston Kinsolver III is studying the park from his perch as a doorman at the St. Urban, a luxurious apartment building on Central Park West. He took the position in order to observe the actions of two St. Urban families—the Van Pelts and the DeAngeluses—and several employees at the nearby American Museum of Natural History, all of whom are historically connected to Gilboa. Kinsolver has some family secrets and scores to settle that are also connected to his Gilboa roots. The story rotates back and forth between the 1990s-set tale and the stories of two past generations of Kinsolver’s family. Running concurrent to the twisty tale of family sins is the complicated discussion of the fossils of the “Gilboa Tree,” remnants of an ancient forest believed to date back to the Devonian Period, 350 to 400 million years ago. There’s also an engaging subplot involving the amphibious lungfish—a creature that’s very similar to its Devonian ancestor—that has mysteriously appeared in the reservoir in the ’90s. Kinsolver is the first-person narrator of his own plotline and the third-person narrator of a historical saga that’s so complicated and full of characters and tangled relationships that readers will need great patience to keep track of them all despite the opening lineage chart. Overall, however, Wheelwright is a thoughtful, meticulous writer with a fondness for elegant, if rather lengthy, sentences, and his novel offers melancholic, philosophical musings on the frailties of one of Earth’s other successful species: Homo sapiens.
A scientifically intriguing, dramatic, and challenging read.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953236-47-0
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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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