A well-written but incomplete snapshot of a turbulent time.
A novel focuses on the chaotic journey of three friends during the late 1960s and the gritty early ’70s, when flower power wilts under the forces of evil.
High school pals Melissa, Peach, and Fiona are adrift after graduation, but that doesn’t mean their lives lack drama as they search for purpose (and men). It’s the tail end of the ’60s, and the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Apollo 11, Easy Rider, anti-war marches, the abortion issue, the draft, Kent State, and the Kama Sutra all make appearances. To help guide the three to their futures and to prevent them from committing themselves to making decisions, they dabble in tarot cards, which involve a higher power too vague for them to understand yet one they believe in. Thankfully for Fiona, her Roman Catholic parents don’t know anything about this—and that she really likes men. But while Peach finds a boyfriend, Fiona and Melissa are still looking for companionship. Melissa complains about her and Fiona’s bleak situation to Peach: “No matter what we do, it turns to shit. Neither of our lives is working out, especially compared to you. We don’t have boyfriends. Nothing. Right, Fee?” Soon, Fiona and Melissa do have boyfriends. Fiona plans to follow soul mate Reuben to Canada, where he can avoid the draft, but Melissa suffers a harsher fate. Melissa’s belief in the occult is put to rest when Vincent, an older interloper with Satanic aspirations, appears briefly on the scene. He supposedly cut a deal with the devil to become a rock star but needs a willing accomplice to help him. In this ambitious and skillfully written novel, Edwards presents three intriguing protagonists and delivers some rich period details, including about the Vietnam War and abortion laws. But the Vincent subplot does not bolster the narrative even though Melissa (for a time) believes in the guy. In addition, civil rights, one of the era’s most important stories, isn’t meaningfully addressed here. After Peach runs off to San Francisco with an African American man, she hardly enters the story again. In a tale about this tumultuous period, the issue could have been more fully explored. The women’s movement gets short shrift as well. And the author offers a somewhat inconclusive ending.
A well-written but incomplete snapshot of a turbulent time.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-285-1
Page Count: 424
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2022
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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