An engaging tale that wears its sincerity proudly and offers readers spiritual sustenance.
In this novel, a patient tries to save a man through friendship and love—with some angels looking on and help from Middle Eastern wisdom.
Willie Owen is in a very bad way. He got a taste of happiness as a talented high school and college football star, but that soured quickly in the face of his dysfunctional upbringing. His mother demeaned him; his father was distant; and the two eventually divorced. As is often the case, Willie blamed the problems mostly on himself. His own marriage is no better; he lives like a ghost in the same house with his wife and two kids. As a custodian at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, he meets Wisam, a young man from Lebanon who is dying of lung cancer. For Wisam, the glass is always half—no, three-quarters—full. In fact, he is a self-appointed angel figure, determined to teach Willie how to be happy. After many painful, even slogging chapters—including Wisam’s family’s horrifying story—Willie may be on the path to success. Abdullaoglu is clearly an author who writes from the heart. The only striking physical action occurs when Willie gets fed up with the rude and cynical Dr. Stevens, the book’s foil, and decks him. This is a philosophical novel that poses the question (among others): How can a person find happiness? Or, put another way, how can one break the chains that years of unhappiness forge? One thinks of E.A. Robinson’s haunting lines “Familiar as an old mistake, / And futile as regret.” That is the Willie who agonizes in silence, a case study in the corrosive effects of anger and the possible salvation that lies in forgiveness. These are not new ideas. One could easily call them bromides, and Willie’s arc may seem a bit simple and obvious to many readers. But the author has created two strong characters in Willie and Wisam and added some genuine wisdom and intriguing developments.
An engaging tale that wears its sincerity proudly and offers readers spiritual sustenance.Pub Date: July 1, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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