So sharp, so funny. You might feel better or worse about your own life, but you'll definitely be laughing.
What if "the memo" wasn't a metaphor, and you really didn't get it?
At 35, Jenny Green is happy-ish. She lives in Pittsburgh—not exactly the center of the universe—with Hal, an unambitious but super-hot guy she met nine years ago on a beach in Costa Rica. She works for a philanthropy that supports girls and women, which sounds good on paper, but it's really a vanity project for a wealthy nightmare of a woman who only wants Jenny to get her coverage in the national media. Oh, and it turns out Hal is having an affair. Jenny has no desire to go to her 15-year college reunion, but she skipped the last one and her (more successful) friends are persistent. What she doesn't expect, once on campus, is to run into Desiree LeBlanc, the pushy career counselor whose advice she spurned just before graduation—and who's now offering her another chance. It turns out Desiree had been planning to give her the Memo—the "actual, tangible, Upper-Case-Letter thing"—and the fact that Jenny has spent her life floundering can be attributed to her having walked away. But Jenny isn't just going to be following the Memo's advice going forward; Desiree and her Consortium have discovered a way to send her back to crucial moments in the past with explicit instructions on what she should be doing to turn herself into a self-actualized superwoman. What could go wrong? Dodes and Mechling have come up with a great concept—the elevator pitch writes itself!—and filled it with insight, wit, and perfectly chosen details of life among a segment of the population that might once have looked at Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In as a guide. They explore issues of love, work, friendship, ambition, and fulfillment that feel timeless yet particularly pertinent in the social media era, when it's so hard to see past the surface of other people's high-powered facades.
So sharp, so funny. You might feel better or worse about your own life, but you'll definitely be laughing.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780063319356
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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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