An ambitious, engaging novel that explores the power of finding personal connection to the past.
Stories, letters, and journals connect the tumultuous lives of several women in a single family over three centuries in this debut novel.
In a prologue set in 2014, Rachel Pearson Strand reflects on her mother’s enigmatic last words: “I am like Ana,” she says. “I have failed Juliana.” Those names, unfamiliar to Rachel, act as a springboard for D’Harlingue’s debut historical novel, which interweaves the lives of characters over multiple generations. In the first part, set in 1661 Madrid, Ana grieves her physician husband, Emilio Cardero Diaz, and helps her brother, also widowed, raise his 16-year-old daughter, Juliana, who’s never been told the truth about her mother’s death. The story unfolds in short, alternating chapters, each focusing on a different character, with many in diary or letter form. Ana discovers her late husband’s journal, which reveals his long-held desire to travel to the New World, and then finds Juliana’s diary, which she kept after she fled her childhood home. Her father had killed a man who’d raped her but then aimed to kill Juliana, as well, because he couldn’t bear the loss of “honor.” The book’s second part shifts to 1992, when Rachel, who’s pregnant, reveals to her dying mother that she’s about to have a girl. Rachel, who teaches Spanish at a university, later finds a packet of documents that continue Juliana’s story, including her escape to Mexico City and her life in a convent, which also shelters her daughter. D’Harlingue’s prose is languid and sure throughout this novel and especially effective at threading in intriguing details of 17th-century Spain and Mexico City, including the role of education in the lives of women. Ana, Juliana, and Rachel are all distinct characters, with Juliana’s journey the most compelling. However, the episodic, often epistolary plot structure somewhat slackens the tension and drama surrounding Juliana’s courageous life choices. The inclusion of each generation makes for a crowded closing section, as well. Nevertheless, the rhythms of these women’s lives are sure to resonate with readers.
An ambitious, engaging novel that explores the power of finding personal connection to the past.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-743-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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