Lacks the zest of the earlier books and doubles down on the weak writing.
An elite Black community in coastal Maryland learns that the mayor has a “secret love child.”
Having set her previous Summer Beach books in the enclaves of Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, and Sag Harbor, New York, The View host Hostin closes up shop in Highland Beach, a resort community founded in the late 19th century by Frederick Douglass’ son. According to its website, it is "residential only, does not offer opportunities for tourism and cannot accommodate visits from the general public." Hostin definitely conveys that attitude as her character Olivia Jones pays a hesitant first visit to the snooty town, whose mayor is her long-estranged father, Charles "CJ" Jones, whose reelection will be compromised by her arrival. (Olivia’s complicated backstory is explained hastily and will remain opaque to those who haven’t read the first two books.) She is also meeting for the first time her evil grandmother, Christine Douglass-Jones (that Douglass), a woman who sees the death of two of her three children as more a reputation problem than a cause for mourning. Don’t feel sorry for me, she tells an old enemy, "I have money, class, and I’ve traveled to places you’ve only dreamed of." Maybe this is meant to be a laugh line, but some of the wooden dialogue, the tabloid-type gossip about Frederick Douglass, and the oddly placed, uninspiring descriptions of people’s attire are not. In one laugh-out-loud moment, a deus ex machinacharacter storms into a town meeting “wearing an ankle-length persimmon dress.” No designer or anything! As in previous books, characters rely on therapy to deal with their messy lives and romances (Olivia has managed to screw up a good thing she had going in Sag Harbor). The wisdom of Olivia’s therapist, Dr. LaGrange, saves the day: “Life is a journey. You hit a milestone and then you move on to your next goal. The work never really ends. Nor should it.” This beach trilogy, however, should.
Lacks the zest of the earlier books and doubles down on the weak writing.Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9780062994257
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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