A high energy, feel-good story about the ghosts of our past and the importance of human connections.
Three women search for different types of long-lost loves in this tale of unlikely friendships.
The novel opens as an older woman named Maude awaits her groom on their wedding day. When Richard doesn’t show, Maude calls him at home, and he admits he’s gotten cold feet. Next, readers meet Mackenzie, whose teenage sister, Tanya, is sneaking out of their bedroom window only to disappear permanently into the dangerous night. Finally, Sunna is introduced. She has been arguing with her closest girlfriend, Brett. As Richard did to Maude and Tanya did to Mackenzie, Brett ghosts Sunna, leaving her angry and confused. A couple of years later, the three women who were left end up renting rooms in the same house in Saskatchewan. The home, owned by Larry Finley, could use some repairs. When water seeps into the mailbox, a letter is partially destroyed, and the women can't determine who it was meant for. All they glean is that the author would like to meet at a local coffee shop. The proposed date and time have also been washed away. Each woman hopes the letter was addressed to her. All three thus decide to visit the designated coffee shop every day and await the writer. During their time at the shop, the women get to know each other. They argue, invade each other’s privacy, and blame each other for strange occurrences around the house. As the days drag on, they discover there are additional mysteries to which they might help each other find answers, and amazingly, they begin to bond. Quirky and unique, the book spans multiple genres, from romance to mystery to good old-fashioned ghost story. The author deftly moves between spheres as she depicts highly divergent characters who ultimately find common ground. Told in the third person, the narrative offers insightful glimpses into the perspectives of all three women and even Larry, their landlord. The fast-paced plot is alternatively funny and heart-wrenching. While certain parts of the plot might stretch the imagination, the human emotions are consistently realistic and engaging.
A high energy, feel-good story about the ghosts of our past and the importance of human connections.Pub Date: June 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1020-7
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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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