Coventry

November 10, 2008
Humphreys’s lethargic latest depicts the intertwining lives of two British women during the world wars. Harriet and Maeve meet on the streets of Coventry, England, in 1914. Both are of troubled mind: Harriet’s husband has just left for the battlegrounds of France, and Maeve can’t shake a deep sense of loneliness. The women share laughs on a bus ride, but afterwards their lives continue on different paths. Harriet’s husband, Owen, goes missing (and is presumed killed) in action, and Harriet spends the next two decades mourning his loss. Maeve becomes pregnant out of wedlock and works a string of odd jobs to raise her son, Jeremy. In the chaos of the German bombing of Coventry in 1940, Harriet befriends Jeremy, who, at 22, stirs intense memories of Owen. Together, they search the town for Jeremy’s mother and forge an intense bond. Humphreys’s characters are given to poetic tendencies that occasionally yield interesting insights on the nature of loss and change, though the cast tends toward the indistinct and the narrative feels too in service of the historical record.

Starred review from November 15, 2008
First published in France in 2002, Laurrent 's novel is the misshapen tale of a lecherous white-collar criminal who finds himself on a honeymoon with the boss 's sexy wife.

We first see Clovis Baccara leaving a Paris loft, telling his latest conquest emphatically that she was only a one-night stand. The 40-year-old Clovis, a sexual athlete who sometimes uses whores, has never married; the tenderness in marriage that grows as passion ebbs would disgust him. There was a time, 20 years before when he was a heavy drug user, that life itself disgusted him; he was saved from suicide by an ex-con, Oscar Lux, his neighbor in a fleabag hotel. Groomed by Oscar, Clovis has become his right-hand man, expertly laundering money for his crime empire. Now, attending Oscar 's wedding as his best man, he is undone by the beauty of the bride, Veronica, becoming as awkward as a teenager. One dance with her seals his infatuation, and his own "tragic outcome. " When Oscar is arrested the next day, he instructs Clovis to escort Veronica to their honeymoon hotel in Los Angeles; Oscar will join them later. Clovis, caught between the strength of his desire and his unwillingness to cuckold Oscar, tries to keep his distance from Veronica, an outrageous flirt; but this is not easily done, since he 's sleeping on a daybed outside her bedroom in the honeymoon suite. The author might have intended a sexual comedy or, more pretentiously, a fable about hubris and nemesis (it 's tricked out with classical references). Either way, it fails. Laurrent has no gift for narrative, pacing or characterization. Instead of character development, he gives us inventories: of rooms, hotel guests, boardwalk attractions. Too often he writes like someone who 's just swallowed a dictionary ( "Woeful is the anaphora that all is but a hapax "). The stalemate between Clovis and Veronica ends abruptly, and Clovis fulfills his so-called tragic destiny soon after.

A decent premise, but the story goes nowhere.

(COPYRIGHT (2008) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 1, 2009
During the Battle of Britain, Coventry was the only English city to lose its cathedral in the German bombings. Canadian poet and novelist Humphreys ("A Jealous Ghost") here relates how that tragic event affected the lives of her three protagonists. Middle-aged and widowed Harriet Marsh stands in for a friend as a fire warden on the cathedral's roof that fateful night of November 14, 1940, as the planes of the Luftwaffe head for Coventry to destroy its industrial establishment and much of the rest of the city. There she encounters Jeremy Fisher, the young son of a woman she met years ago after the outbreak of the Great War, in which Harriet lost her husband. Jeremy's artist mom, Maeve, spends the evening wandering around the besieged city hoping to find her son. Humphreys's account is presented with a poet's attention to detail and "le mot juste", but she spares us none of the horrors of war. A slight but compelling volume recommended for academic and public libraries.Edward Cone, New York

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2009
Humphreys slim little novel packs a tremendous emotional punch. Harriet and Maeve meet briefly on a bus in 1914; years later they cross paths again during the devastating German bombing of Coventry. As firewatchers, Harriet and Jeremy make their way across the smoldering city in search of Jeremys mother, Maeve, the womens individual stories begin to unfold. Widowed in the Great War, Harriet has never quite recovered from her great loss. A single mother, Maeve has toiled ceaselessly to create a life for herself and her son. By the time the two meet again, a pervasive sense of impending doom has permeated the narrative, making tragedy all but inevitable. Humphreys adeptly depicts how the random intersection of lives can impact destiny in this remarkable war-torn-city story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)