This upbeat story triumphs thanks to its veracity and memorable characters.
Family members learn more about themselves and each other on a global journey in Reed’s novel.
At the heart of this moving work is a family matriarch, 75-year-old Lucinda Billings Maynard “Cinny” Posey. Though she is loath to admit it, Cinny has begun a slow slide into Parkinson’s disease. She’s hellbent against the concept of assisted living but is giving into assisted dying: She convinces her resistant adult children, Grace and Brian, to help her get moved into hospice care, where her plan is to starve herself to death. During her lengthy decline, Cinny scrawls page after page, finally stuffing these papers into seven envelopes and giving them to Grace as death descends. Her wish is to have her family take a trip around the world to scatter her ashes and those of her late English professor husband, Frank. Embarking on this journey are Grace, her husband, Jack, and their daughter, 24-year-old Chelsea; they are joined by bisexual Brian, his new bride, Ella, and her 16-year-old daughter, Sage. At each stop along the way, Cinny’s notes shed clarity on her relationship with Frank, helping Grace, Brian, and the rest to better understand their family’s dynamic. By the time the whirlwind pilgrimage ends, they are all more secure in their relationships with each other. The author successfully mines his personal history, including his background in academics and international travel, lending authenticity to this engaging narrative. The story is fast-paced, giving the reader the feel of the family’s rapid travel through Asia and Europe over three short weeks. The novel truly thrives thanks to its cast, beginning with Cinny, a child of Woodstock and a character with a capital C (Grace marvels, “She looks ten years older, but there’s so much of the old Mom there. Laughing. Joking. Giving me shit. I don’t have a clue how she manages to keep it up”) whose dying wish is to improve the lives of her twins, Grace and Brian, who have been clashing since sharing the womb. The result is a bracing novel in which an extended family actually returns re-energized from an exhausting voyage.
This upbeat story triumphs thanks to its veracity and memorable characters.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780825310263
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Beaufort Books
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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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