A truly marvelous tale of pandemic and puns and endurance.
An artist in England copes with old and new strangers in a time of plague in this touching entertainment.
Painter Sandy Gray is at home in England in 2021 imagining Cerberus talking to a British policeman when she gets a call from someone she barely knew at college some 30 years earlier. Martina Pelf, who remembers Sandy as being good at explaining things, tells her about getting stopped at border control on her return from a trip to collect a 16th-century lock for the museum where she works. While being held in an interview room, Martina hears a disembodied voice ask a strange sort-of question: “curlew or curfew.” This is Smith's pandemic land, where myth and reality converse, where lockdown might evoke medieval artisanry, and where wordplay is more than playful. The Scottish author’s 12th novel displays once again her ingenuity in pulling together disparate narrative strands. The main one concerns the fallout from the unexpected phone call, which sends Sandy, who narrates the novel, back to a moment at university when she explained an e.e. cummings poem for Martina and forward to a point when, in one long hilarious scene, the Pelf family invades Sandy’s home, breaking all the pandemic rules. She recalls the story of an aunt’s illness in the 1930s and often thinks of her father, who is currently in the hospital with an ailment that won’t be revealed until the penultimate page. The curlew and the curfew will resurface when a homeless teenager breaks into Sandy’s house and then, in a 40-page fable, is pre-incarnated as a gifted teen blacksmith, perhaps the artisan behind the aforementioned lock. With art and humor, Ali is the smith who forges links for her idiosyncratic narrative, one of which is the value of acts of kindness amid distress.
A truly marvelous tale of pandemic and puns and endurance.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-31637-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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