Romantic, terrifying, brutal, tender, and, in the end, sneakily hopeful. What a writer.
Two 15-year-old Glasgow boys, one Protestant and one Catholic, share a love against all odds.
The Sighthill tenement where Shuggie Bain (2020), Stuart's Booker Prize–winning debut, unfurled is glimpsed in his follow-up, set in the 1990s in an adjacent neighborhood. You wouldn't think you'd be eager to return to these harsh, impoverished environs, but again this author creates characters so vivid, dilemmas so heart-rending, and dialogue so brilliant that the whole thing sucks you in like a vacuum cleaner. As the book opens, Mungo's hard-drinking mother, Mo-Maw, is making a rare appearance at the flat where Mungo lives with his 16-year-old sister, Jodie. Jodie has full responsibility for the household, as their older brother, Hamish, a Proddy warlord, lives with the 15-year-old mother of his child and her parents. Mo-Maw's come by only to pack her gentle son off on a manly fishing trip with two disreputable strangers. Though everything about these men is alarming to Mungo, "fifteen years he had lived and breathed in Scotland, and he had never seen a glen, a loch, a forest, or a ruined castle." So at least there's that to look forward to. This ultracreepy weekend plays out over the course of the book, interleaved with the events of the months before. Mungo has met a neighbor boy named James, who keeps racing pigeons in a "doocot"; the boys are kindred spirits and offer each other a tenderness utterly absent from any other part of their lives. But a same-sex relationship across the sectarian divide is so unthinkable that their every interaction is laced with fear. Even before Hamish gets wind of these goings-on, he too has decided to make Mungo a man, forcing him to participate in a West Side Story–type gang battle. As in Shuggie Bain, the yearning for a mother's love is omnipresent, even on the battlefield. "They kept their chests puffed out until they could be safe in their mammies’ arms again; where they could coorie into her side as she watched television and she would ask, 'What is all this, eh, what’s with all these cuddles?' and they would say nothing, desperate to just be boys again, wrapped up safe in her softness."
Romantic, terrifying, brutal, tender, and, in the end, sneakily hopeful. What a writer.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5955-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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