A serious story, luminously told.
A twin brother and sister work to overcome their family's superstition as well as their own personal demons.
Marta and Nick were brought up by their mother with a warning about a tendency for people in their family to be gravely injured or killed by falls. It all began when a great-great-grandfather pushed a stonemason out a window in Prague, an act known as defenestration, which forced him to flee to the American Midwest and seems to have led to an uncanny string of falls in the family. Their father’s love provided levity for the twins and balanced out their strictly religious mother’s dogma, but after Nick graduates from college and tells his parents he's gay, his mother kicks him out, and the family is irrevocably changed. Told through brief vignettes from Marta's first-person perspective, the story recounts how the twins went to live in Prague and attempted to make sense of their upbringing and obsession with falling. In the current timeline, Marta visits Nick in the hospital after his own fall and remeets her mother after years of estrangement. Branum makes excellent use of the fragmented structure of her debut novel, offering meditations on Prague’s rich history and architecture; Buster Keaton and his theatrical falls, as well as other historical people who famously survived falls; the difficulties of close relationships that define you but also bind you; and the complicated legacies of family stories that defy clarity or comfort. Even as Marta’s own well-being depends on her finding an ability to heal separately from Nick, she muses on this unknowability: “I know then, with a shiver of certainty, that sometimes a story can have a meaning for the teller that no one else, no matter how many times they hear it, can unearth.”
A serious story, luminously told.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63557-739-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Still more brilliant escapism among Kwan’s 1 percenters. Too much is never enough.
Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Or, maybe let’s.
In his second follow-up to the blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, Kwan continues to wrap fairy-tale love stories in glitz, glamour, couture, fine art, and delicious wit. (It’s possible that the author is on a diet because the food component seems slightly less dominant than usual.) This time, our star-crossed lovers are Rufus Gresham, Viscount St. Ives, a man whose beauty has been driving women to distraction since he was photographed in his boxers ironing a dress shirt at age 16, and Eden Tong, a young doctor who lives with her widowed father on the family property at Greshamsbury Hall. Though Rufus has been madly in love and planning to marry Eden since childhood, he is about to run into a solid wall of opposition from his mother, Lady Arabella. Since she and Lord Gresham have managed to drain the family coffers, she is determined to save the family by having each of her three children marry serious money. But right from the start, when an active volcano interrupts the wedding of daughter Augusta to Scandinavian royalty, things don’t go her way. Often hilarious epigraphs and fourth-wall-breaking footnotes include this: “Founded in 1875 in Venice, Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua was also the official supplier of precious fabrics to the Vatican until Pope Paul VI decided to tighten the belt on luxury goods. (This would explain the pillows from Target I saw in the waiting room during my last audience with the Pope.)” One also enjoys the gossip articles, invitations, and menus sprinkled through the text, and the little icons used to signal location changes—Hawaii hibiscus, London Big Ben, Greshamsbury tea set, Houston oil derrick, etc.—are adorable.
Still more brilliant escapism among Kwan’s 1 percenters. Too much is never enough.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780385546294
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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