Fans of the island-lit genre will find familiar pleasures but also unrealistic situations and cringeworthy moments.
When a novelist writer retreats to Block Island to hide, his new life gets off on the wrong foot with a big lie.
Anthony Puckett, son of a blockbuster writer of James Patterson–esque dimensions, published his first novel to acclaim so fervent it made his father jealous. Unfortunately, his sophomore effort was found to contain 1,200 words plagiarized from a little-known Irish author. (How do you steal 1,200 words from one novel and drop them unchanged into another? Don't think about this too long.) His downward spiral hits bottom when his soulless bitch of a wife puts him out of the house and cuts off communication between him and his 4-year-old son. Off he goes as "Anthony Jones" to a borrowed cabin on Block Island, where his next-door neighbor is a former attorney who graduated fourth in her class at Stanford Law but is now unhappily married to a surgical oncologist who has demanded she abandon her career to become a stay-at-home mom. In secret, she has become a popular food blogger under a false identity: an articulate, sensitive stay-at-home dad posting as Dinner by Dad. In a coincidence that the author herself labels bold, Dinner by Dad is the favorite food blog of the island native who becomes Anthony's love interest—Joy, a single mom and whoopie-pie entrepreneur with a teenager, who in turn ends up babysitting at the home of the food blogger. Novelist that he is, Anthony often identifies "plot twists" in his life as they arrive, and the final section of this book will give him plenty of material, with an apparent kidnapping, a hurricane, a sudden death, and an earthshaking backstory reveal. Moore (The Captain's Daughter, 2017, etc.) has a pretty jaded view of writers—liars, plagiarists, lukewarm mothers, and terrible fathers. This book has all the elements of an Elin Hildebrand novel—island setting, writer character, second-chance love story—without the polish and sophistication, which unfortunately cannot be pasted in via references to Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, etc. Editing could have deleted some of the flat-footed, sometimes-laughable dialogue and the near-silliness of the cavalcade of climactic events. Also, how many times does someone have to say they have something to tell you before you let them spit it out?
Fans of the island-lit genre will find familiar pleasures but also unrealistic situations and cringeworthy moments.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-284006-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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