De los Santos writes with disarming fluidity even when her plot takes far-fetched turns, but her heroine's inexhaustible...
Marital abuse is the central issue in de los Santos' (The Precious One, 2015, etc.) latest, which is made up of two intersecting stories: a contemporary woman is engaged to a man with possibly scary anger issues and, in the 1950s, another woman faces difficult choices after the death of her beloved husband.
One day before Clare (who, along with other characters here, has appeared in previous de los Santos novels) is scheduled to marry good-looking lawyer Zach at a Virginia resort, an elderly stranger walks by while she's making centerpieces and says, “Courage, dear heart,” which happens to be a quote from one of Clare’s beloved Narnia books. The next morning, Clare finds herself talking in more depth to the stranger, Edith, who warns her not to live with someone who scares her. Already deeply apprehensive about marrying Zach because he has to work “so hard to be good,” Clare takes Edith’s advice and calls off the wedding. Edith dies shortly afterward and bequeaths her house on the Delaware coast to Clare. At loose ends after the non-wedding, Clare—who, unlike Zach, is naturally good as well as sensitive and loving—goes there to recover and to avoid Zach’s borderline stalking. The novel moves back and forth between Clare’s current romantic quandary and Edith’s difficult life in the '50s: her idyllic but tragically brief marriage, her years as a young widow running a vacation boardinghouse, her affair with a handsome stranger from the city who involves her in his “relocation system” for women escaping abusive husbands, the risk she takes to help a young mother who has killed her violent husband in self-defense. Readers learn most of these details long before Clare figures them out, although her natural curiosity about Edith draws her and her best friend/former boyfriend, Dev, into Nancy Drew–like sleuthing. Their playful, increasingly romantic enjoyment of the adventure in uncovering Edith’s past creates an odd contrast to the actual serious drama of Edith’s life.
De los Santos writes with disarming fluidity even when her plot takes far-fetched turns, but her heroine's inexhaustible perfection grows cloying.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-243193-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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