Fran Hawthorne's Blog
December 1, 2022
Review from "The Rose City Reader"
I MEANT TO TELL YOU "would be a terrific book club pick" --
Thanks, Rose City Reader!
Thanks, Rose City Reader!
September 30, 2022
Thanks to The Indypendent
Wow, such a wonderful review in The Indypendent of my new novel I MEANT TO TELL YOU:
"complex, evocative and nuanced...the richly drawn characters in I Meant to Tell You are both wholly human and wholly believable"
(There's a Spoiler Alert for paragraph 8, but that's okay; there are still plenty of surprises awaiting you in the book!)
https://indypendent.org/2022/09/oh-th...
"complex, evocative and nuanced...the richly drawn characters in I Meant to Tell You are both wholly human and wholly believable"
(There's a Spoiler Alert for paragraph 8, but that's okay; there are still plenty of surprises awaiting you in the book!)
https://indypendent.org/2022/09/oh-th...
June 29, 2018
Review from The Jewish Week
I'm thrilled that my novel "The Heirs" as included in a roundup of seven books for summer reading in "The Jewish Weekly." Here's what the reviewer, Sandee Brawarsky, said:
"Opening in the beginning of the 2000s, Fran Hawthorne’s debut novel THE HEIRS (SFA Books) is about inheriting stories. Eleanor Ritter is the daughter of an elderly Holocaust survivor — her Polish-born mother has long refused to speak of her experience. But after breaking her hip and landing in the hospital, her mother begins speaking Polish again, more than 50 years after arriving in America. Fragments of her story are revealed, and Eleanor grows increasingly, perhaps obsessively, curious to learn about her family’s past.
"This is a novel of suburban New Jersey, and Hawthorne gets the soccer leagues and bat mitzvah party preparation just right. Eleanor meets the Polish Catholic parents of her son’s soccer friend and tries to tease out their story too, sensing possible connections. Hawthorne, who has written eight nonfiction books, presents a powerful meditation on identity, family history and the legacy of war."
"Opening in the beginning of the 2000s, Fran Hawthorne’s debut novel THE HEIRS (SFA Books) is about inheriting stories. Eleanor Ritter is the daughter of an elderly Holocaust survivor — her Polish-born mother has long refused to speak of her experience. But after breaking her hip and landing in the hospital, her mother begins speaking Polish again, more than 50 years after arriving in America. Fragments of her story are revealed, and Eleanor grows increasingly, perhaps obsessively, curious to learn about her family’s past.
"This is a novel of suburban New Jersey, and Hawthorne gets the soccer leagues and bat mitzvah party preparation just right. Eleanor meets the Polish Catholic parents of her son’s soccer friend and tries to tease out their story too, sensing possible connections. Hawthorne, who has written eight nonfiction books, presents a powerful meditation on identity, family history and the legacy of war."
