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ALL THE GIRLS IN TOWN

A sharp-witted, topical novel.

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In Greason’s debut novel, three spurned women hatch a plan to destroy the man who hurt them.

At the advice of her Overeaters Anonymous sponsor, Dani Smith has taken to journaling about her negative feelings regarding the dissolution of her marriage. When she does, she finds that her entries portray her unfaithful rock-star ex-husband, Peter, dying in various painful or embarrassing ways. “Each morning, Dani awoke, heart fluttering, eager to stab, shoot, or poison Peter. She filled the blank pages of journals with the flames of her revenge fantasies until they caught fire and exploded into her blog, ‘Just Deserts,’ with (currently) sixty-one avid followers @just-deserts.” As Dani’s posts get more extreme, they garner more attention, including from other women who have known the pain of loving Peter. Red dated Peter in college before he left her suddenly for another woman—and then began a new relationship with him 20 years later that ended after only a few weeks when she learned she was pregnant and he was married. (Humiliated, Red terminated the pregnancy.) Red finds “Just Deserts” so cathartic that she seeks out Dani—who has just had her troubled 13-year-old niece thrust upon her—and befriends her. She’s impressed by Dani’s sick imagination, but she doesn’t want to waste it on blogs: She wants to destroy Peter’s life for real. The key to doing so may be Sasha, Peter’s current wife and former backup singer. Sasha is pregnant with twins, though she lives in fear that her husband will leave her for her tour replacement. Can these three women find common cause and bring down a guy who has broken hearts all over Los Angeles? To do so, they’ll first have to help one another rebuild their self-esteem.

Greason’s prose is precise and darkly comic, particularly the excerpts from Dani’s blog, which form their own short chapters. For legal reasons, Dani always refers to Peter as Steve, as here, where she fantasizes about poisoning a birthday meal: “Steve went into the bedroom and shut the door. I tiptoed after, listening for a moment to his soft whispers on the other side, and then I went into the kitchen, pulled the Drano out from under the sink, and stirred it slowly into the bubbling red sauce in the pot on the stove.” Though the premise is not entirely original, Greason pushes the plot deep into #MeToo territory in a way that gives it unexpected emotional heft. The characters, though heightened, are complex and believable, and the relationships that develop among Dani, Red, and Sasha—who have all served as “the other woman” in one another’s lives—are engrossing. The novel’s end is right out of one of Dani’s blog posts, and there’s a neatness to it all that doesn’t often happen in real-life #MeToo cases, but Greason keeps the book on the fine line between realism and farce. The result makes for a satisfying read that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

A sharp-witted, topical novel.

Pub Date: July 26, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-956851-12-0

Page Count: 382

Publisher: TouchPoint Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2022

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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THE WEDDING PEOPLE

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

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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

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