Wry, sharp, charming, resistant to neat closures and easy turns—a debut of enormous promise.
The witty, fiercely intelligent story of a young alcoholic in the fragile early days of sobriety, suspended between addiction and whatever life might come next—the shape of which he can’t yet see.
Twenty-six-year-old Dennis Monk, just months sober, gets the boot from his parents’ suburban Philadelphia home and begins what will be, over the novel’s episodic chapters, a half-year odyssey as the serial houseguest of relatives, old flames, and running buddies from high school and college. Dennis jumps from makeshift situation to awkward makeshift situation (pushed-together couches he hopes won’t get sold out from under him, cots in basements alongside washing machines) all over a rapidly gentrifying Philadelphia filled with his only-marginally-less-lost peers. Sometimes he’s a freeloader; sometimes he earns his keep, sort of, through errands not always handled successfully, projects he can fake his way through, or fitful employment. Dennis is nimble-tongued and keenly observant, and the book offers all sorts of humorous delights. Yet the reader quickly sees, too, that irony is Dennis’ protective coloration, that his wit is anxious and self-preserving. He may not be a gentrifier, but he is a kind of hipster who, like his coevals, simply wants to cobble together, from the unpromising materials available, an identity he can live in. Beneath the world weariness and sarcasm we get glimpses (for instance, in the bit-by-bit-revealed story of a friend who died from drinking) of a sweetness and vulnerability, even a fragile hopefulness, that Dennis is at pains to hide and resist. This is less a traditional novel than a linked collection of stories, a serial picaresque, but ultimately that approach feels like the right one for a book about navigating—or maybe just drifting through, in search of some useful piece of flotsam to grab hold of—a limbo of one’s own making. As a starting point for a new life, “non-drinker” is a necessary condition...but by itself that datum doesn’t get one very far. The book ends with Dennis, one year sober, on the verge of—well, who knows what, but verges beat sloughs every day.
Wry, sharp, charming, resistant to neat closures and easy turns—a debut of enormous promise.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781662602245
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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