Watts’ gently told story, like Fitzgerald’s, is only superficially about money but more acutely about the urgent,...
The Great Gatsby is revived in an accomplished debut novel.
Winner of a Pushcart Prize and other awards for her short fiction, Watts (We Are Taking Only What We Need, 2011) spins a compelling tale of obsessive love and dashed dreams set in a struggling North Carolina town. The furniture industry that once served as the major employer has shifted its factories to Asia, leaving former workers feeling unmoored and depressed. Even those who have jobs—Sylvia, who works for a social service agency, and her daughter Ava, a college graduate who has risen to loan officer in a bank—see that they have fallen far short of achieving the American dream. Watts creates tender, sympathetic portraits of her two main characters, women enveloped in grief: Sylvia’s for her dead son, Ava’s over her inability to conceive the child she desperately wants. Among the town’s inhabitants, only JJ Ferguson seems to have succeeded: in the 15 years since he left Pinewood, he has become an enviably rich man. Suddenly, he has returned, and Sylvia wonders if he wants to show off, to prove that “someone like her, someone black, someone once poor, could come back to town and smash it underfoot.” But revenge is not why JJ is building a mansion on the hill overlooking the town; he has come back for Ava, whom he has loved since they were children. JJ desires Ava with as much passion as Jay Gatsby felt for Daisy Buchanan. If he won Ava’s heart, Sylvia realized, he “thought he could star in his own adventure, be the hero in his own story.” That desire infects all of Watts’ characters, who wish to star in their own stories, however modest. Sylvia simply wants to be a “known person,” to feel “that she had been important to someone.” That need compels her to form a relationship with a prisoner rejected by everyone else in his life. Ava’s overwhelming need is to be a mother.
Watts’ gently told story, like Fitzgerald’s, is only superficially about money but more acutely about the urgent, inexplicable needs that shape a life.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247298-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
PROFILES
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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