An uneven but overall impressive debut.
Life gets complicated when two people quickly move from drinks to passion to cohabitation and trying to conceive amid family pressures and the inescapable burdens of the past.
Henry, a successful New York fertility doctor of 55, meets Costanza, an Italian American translator of 39, while he is speaking at a conference in Florence and shepherding his son Andrew around museums. But Andrew and Costanza have already met, and something has clicked there, too. Frank, a literary critic, showed himself to be a smart, observant writer with his first book, The Mighty Franks (2017), a memoir of Hollywood and familial dysfunction. So he avoids anything as obvious as a simple romantic triangle in his fiction debut. Costanza meets Henry again in Manhattan, where she soon agrees to move in with him and shortly thereafter begins the IVF protocol because of her age and the trouble she had conceiving with her late husband, a famous Roth-like novelist. Frank is insightful and sympathetic on the mental and physical toll of her treatments, and he has a strong sense of family dynamics and crackling dialogue, especially in any scene featuring Henry’s crotchety father or cynical other son. But the novel has a few problems. The cast is almost exclusively white and wealthy, which may dilute sympathy for all the shadows that darken their doorman-building lives. Hints about the plot’s central revelation are fairly obvious, including moments of puzzling recognition and Andrew’s alluding to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and saying, “I am too much in the sun.” Some of the writing tends to melodrama, and the sex scenes can be painful: “He didn’t know if he was inside her or she was inside him. Their crotches were joined, soaked; electric.” This from a fertility specialist?
An uneven but overall impressive debut.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-29838-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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