Readers who are averse to crying in public be warned: You’ll want to sit with this astounding story at home.
A single mother navigates custody of her granddaughter—and tries to correct mistakes she made the first time around—in this gentle but heart-wrenching story.
When London schoolteacher Ruth learns that her daughter, Eleanor, is pregnant, the two are sharing a meager Christmas dinner on a park bench. Eleanor is years into debilitating addiction, living on and off the streets with her baby's father, Ben, but Ruth pushes past Eleanor's resistance to offer help when Lily is born—holding vigil as the newborn goes through withdrawal in the hospital, taking control of the baptism as Eleanor and Ben keep wandering off, regularly stopping by their apartment to make sure they’re eating. When Ruth finds an unresponsive person in Eleanor’s apartment—ostensibly an overdose—she flees with Lily, anticipating a fight for custody that never comes. The years pass swiftly, almost perfunctorily, as Lily grows into a kind, strong-willed, and precocious child, “someone who knows life is a serious business, perhaps a few years before she might,” as Ruth's friend describes her. The pacing matches Ruth’s own matter-of-factness: Her outsize shame leaves little berth for wallowing, and her self-deprecating wit resists maudlin sentimentality. (The greatest source of comic relief comes from Jean Reynolds, Ruth’s co-worker, whose brashness and loyalty make her impossible not to love.) Through intimate first-person narration, Ruth balances the pain of losing a daughter against the hope of a second chance. Her relationship with Lily brings a cautious joy. Ruth can’t look at the girl without seeing the trail of maternal pain that originated with her own mother, who drank disinfectant after Ruth’s father left, and led to Lily’s miraculous birth. Love can go awry—see the double meaning of the title, which Lily discovers on a tombstone: “It kind of sounds like the person tried to be loving but…the aim was wrong”—but can that misdirection be righted? Though Lily isn’t immune from trauma—this is clear when her perspective abruptly takes over in the final third of the book—she is propped up by the strength of Ruth’s devotion.
Readers who are averse to crying in public be warned: You’ll want to sit with this astounding story at home.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781681377810
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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