A surprisingly moving, piercingly effective parable about exorcisms of all sorts of demons.
A woman with little knowledge of her family history is visited by an ancient curse.
Castro returns to her sweet spot—layering folkloric monsters onto private trauma—for this generational ghost story. Even those who enjoy a straightforward horror tale may be dismayed by the sheer despair surrounding the titular Alejandra. Terrified by motherhood and depressed by her own self-loathing, she finds suicide whispering in her ear amid a cacophony of slurs like “Difficult woman. Sick woman. Dead woman.” An adoptee of Mexican descent who has only recently reconnected with her birth mother, Alejandra is isolated in an upper-middle-class ivory tower thanks to her absentmindedly cruel husband and three demanding children. Unaware of her family history, she imagines her demons to be illness, unchecked. We soon learn that Alejandra’s torture comes via La Llorona, a mythic woman who drowned her children and herself and now haunts the living as a banshee—or at least something primeval using the folk demon as a guise. As the wraith begins to appear in corporeal form to her children and birth mother, Alejandra finds a comrade in therapist Melanie Ortiz, who has a sideline as a curandera, a spiritual medicine woman. Castro’s remarkable balancing act juxtaposes the emotional turmoil of a bad marriage and depression against the very real and visceral horrors swirling around Alejandra, painting with dripping, peek-between-your-fingers menace. The story is also peppered with flashbacks from the 17th century forward, showing the demon’s trickery toward Alejandra’s ancestors and the fatal consequences that follow. There’s a lot to like here. For horror fans, there’s the palpable feeling of not believing one’s eyes added to the grotesquerie of the drowned fiend and a not inconsiderable amount of child endangerment. At a deeper level, Castro’s tale of a woman both asking for help and taking possession of her own spirit delivers cheerworthy moments of empowerment.
A surprisingly moving, piercingly effective parable about exorcisms of all sorts of demons.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780593499696
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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