An intimate, honest exploration of motherhood, compassionate and beautifully written.
In this memoirlike novel by prizewinning Norwegian author Skomsvold, a writer confides a stream of thoughts and fears to her second child, a baby.
Affected by memories of a debilitating illness, and struggling with anxiety and depression, the narrator is terrified of failing as a mother. "I’m useless when it comes to looking after things. I ruin everything, especially the things I treasure most." Before falling in love with her husband, Bo, she'd been resigned to not having children. After the birth of her first son, she became convinced her brain was altered. "The only thing I managed to write was that I was crying. I’m crying, crying all the time, I wrote." Now, with her second son, she's determined to return to writing. "I wake up in the mornings and look at you and say, today we must work, little one! It was as if you had to come, as if I had to have you to tell you all these things, you had to come and create another new beginning so that I could see in some reasonably clear light the years that went before, and see the change that has taken place." The book, loosely addressed to the baby, details her struggles and anxieties, family history, moments of both panic and calm. She tells him about a beloved aunt, about her and Bo's courtship, the story of a friend who committed suicide. The vivid, fragmentary narrative is shot through with a sense of the passing of time: "I didn’t realize how fast everything changes, how briefly the magnolia trees are in bloom, how quickly the pinched-handkerchief bracts of the dove tree disappear. I’d sat with the child in my arms all through the spring, the summer, the autumn; he was in my arms and in my heart and all the time he was changing ever so slightly. There was something new by the minute, and something else that was lost, and before I knew it that time was gone." As she writes her thoughts and observations, we witness her slowly gaining a greater sense of equanimity. "Fortunately it’s not just happy stories that end well."
An intimate, honest exploration of motherhood, compassionate and beautifully written.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-948830-40-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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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