Family secrets bubble to the surface in this deeply felt comedy.
On her wedding day, a bride locks herself in her bedroom.
Margie and Matti are supposed to be getting married, but Margie has locked the door to her bedroom and won’t respond to anyone who tries to speak with her. Matti and his parents gather outside along with Margie’s mom, Nadia, her cousin, Ilan, and her grandmother. “Well,” says Arieh, Matti’s father, “not to worry. So she won’t talk. She doesn’t have to. The bride does not have to talk, as far as I recall.” But Margie won’t unlock the door, either, and the hours are passing. The caterer keeps calling, and soon the wedding guests will begin to assemble. Matalon (The Sound of Our Steps, 2015, etc.), an award-winning Israeli writer who died in 2017, describes Margie’s situation with great humor as well as pathos. At first, Matti is desperate to get that door open. “Margie!” he shouts. “Do you even care what I’m going through with this whole mess you’ve made?” But as the hours pass, Matti himself starts to feel more and more ambivalent about their wedding. Margie slips an ambiguous poem under the door, but it does little to clarify things—in fact, throughout the book, Margie is the one character who remains silent. Everyone else, meanwhile, is in an uproar. The chaos is reminiscent of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but Jewish, and backwards: This bride doesn’t want to go through with things. Matti’s parents call an organization known as “Reluctant Brides,” which sends over a psychologist. Darker undertones become visible; apparently Margie had a younger sister, Natalie, who disappeared years earlier. Matalon’s last novel is a whirlwind of family chaos and comedy, humor but also great feeling. If the comedy occasionally slips too far into caricature, there’s enough charm here to make up for that, and more besides.
Family secrets bubble to the surface in this deeply felt comedy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-939931-75-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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