An utterly original take on self-perception and perception.
A beguiling, whisper-thin novel about a woman losing her hearing.
At its best, fiction remakes the world, turning what we think we know totally upside down. That’s the case in Rosenfeld’s imaginative debut novel. Louise is totally deaf in one ear, with limited hearing in the other. When her hearing suddenly gets even worse, she needs to decide whether she’s going to get a cochlear implant. At times absurd, but mostly poignant and inventive, the book is really about making sense of the world, exploring the gaps between perception and cognition. To Louise, who has lost her ability to hear middle-low frequencies, language becomes pure sound (“the warmth of timbres”) and touch (“this soft sheen of wind”) and even many senses mixed together (“all sound’s snags and snarls”). Her hearing makes her vulnerable, as she studies people’s lips, tries to snatch words from the world’s din, guesses, and often mishears. In a restaurant, she thinks, “There was a chalkboard on which I was the hangman. ‘F_ _ _ S H _ D?’ the waiter was asking me.” When her hearing keeps worsening, “the monster crouching deep in my ear…gorging on more and more words,” she and her boyfriend communicate in the bathtub, her boyfriend at one end speaking into the water, and she at the other, her good ear resting on the surface of the water, absorbing the vibrations. The book is also a perceptive meditation on identity, with Louise stuck in a kind of “no-man’s-land,” as her doctor puts it, having “built a life as a hearing person” but with the “all the same problems as any deaf person.” The question of who she is becomes more acute as she worries about how an implant might change her: “Would I recognize my mother’s voice…my own voice?” In quietly dazzling prose, Rosenfeld captures what we know but haven’t really seen, what we’ve heard but haven’t quite registered.
An utterly original take on self-perception and perception.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781644452967
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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