Despite intellectual pretentions, including lots of references to Middlemarch, de los Santos (Falling Together, 2011, etc.)...
Half sisters who don’t really know each other are brought together by their emotionally domineering father for reasons of his own.
Inventor/professor/entrepreneur Wilson left his first wife and their adolescent twins, Taisy and Marcus, 17 years ago, and he hasn't seen them in 15 years, since the first birthday party for Willow, his daughter with his new, much younger wife, sculptor Caro. But when Wilson invites Taisy, now a successful ghostwriter in her 30s, to visit him after his heart surgery, she quickly agrees. As she travels, Taisy thinks about her high school boyfriend, Ben, and the way her father destroyed their relationship. What a coincidence that Ben turns up back in town, too. Realizing that her father wants her to ghostwrite his biography, Taisy decides to learn his real story. For all his genius, Wilson has warped almost all the lives he’s touched. As Taisy starts her research, she also begins to re-establish a relationship with the unbelievably sensitive Ben as if neither has changed in almost two decades. Meanwhile, Willow—who considers herself Wilson’s “true daughter”—is struggling. Despite appearing tall, beautiful and collected, she's intimidated by her older sister’s visit. She's also judgmental, assuming Taisy did something horrific to alienate their father, who's shown his younger daughter nothing but affection. And she's having difficulty adjusting to the private high school she’s begun attending while Wilson recuperates. Home-schooled by Wilson through her entire childhood, Willow has little experience of peer friendship or the outside world in general. Soon she has a dangerous crush on her English teacher, but waiting in the wings is a high school boy almost as perfect for her as Ben is for Taisy.
Despite intellectual pretentions, including lots of references to Middlemarch, de los Santos (Falling Together, 2011, etc.) offers a comfort-food story in which men are either predators or perfect and women are both beautiful and brilliant.Pub Date: March 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-167089-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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