A tenderly observant set of tales.
A debut collection of six short stories explores the power of family bonds.
“I hope to highlight some of the many ways in which family can shape us, or even break us,” notes Rosen in her foreword to this brief but memorable compilation. It opens with the title story, in which Maggie Duschene watches a game at Chicago’s Wrigley Field with her uninterested fiance, Cory, and reflects on how baseball was the glue that kept her family together when she was young; a conversation with a neighboring fan leads to a painful revelation. In “The New Ingredient,” a divorced father who hasn’t seen his daughter, Violet, in almost three months is surprised when the 8-year-old brings along an unexpected and unconventional friend on a visit, while in “For What It’s Worth,” a visit to the grave of the narrator’s centenarian grandmother, Ruth, prompts an exploration of their Jewish Russian roots. The collection closes with “ ‘Don’t look too good or talk too wise,’ ” about a student trying to acclimatize to college life. The strongest story is “Empty Cities”; its opening, in which Thomas, a troubled father, watches the world pass by while sitting on a bench, showcases Rosen’s prose at its most sensitive and attentive: “He had slipped off his right shoe when no one on the platform was looking and began tracing the ground with the ball of his foot. Side to side. Forward and back. It reminded him of when he was a child….” It’s a fine example of how the author slips fluidly between characters’ inner and outer worlds. Overall, Rosen proves to be a versatile writer, and “Partition,” about an office worker who finds sanctuary in a restroom stall, provides a master class in writing in the second person, skillfully and engagingly blurring the line between narrator and reader: “In the midst of a brain-crushing, sanity-shrinking workday you’re always able to come in here, sit, and think for a moment.”
A tenderly observant set of tales.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-7871-3818-4
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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