A fun and often funny tale of intersecting lives.
Suburbanites can’t help getting entangled in one another’s troubles in Kaltman’s pet-centric novel.
Towne is a quiet suburb on the East Coast and the sort of place where nothing ever really seems to happen. “Towne is super cute and quaint,” as one character puts it. “Like, in a time warp. Everyone wants to know everyone else’s business, but they get the dirt and go back to their safe little houses like turtles into shells.” Nell Delano is a former math prodigy who, in her 20s, has become eccentric, riding her bike around town at night and occasionally stealing other peoples’ pets. Uninspired novelist Abe Kaufman has just moved to town with his wife, baby, and pit bull, hoping that stay-at-home fatherhood will provide some good material for his fiction. Car mechanic and “wobbly-geezer” Paddy has just lost his wife and must now learn to live again as a single man. There’s also David Leibowitz, who’s about to have a bar mitzvah but suspects that he might actually be a girl; David’s recently divorced mother, Lucinda, who’s looking to build her interior decorating business; and aging, self-centered actor Brady Cole, who’s just moved into the town’s historic mansion as part of a quest to turn his life around. Nearly everyone has a dog and a secret, and their lives connect in ways that readers will find difficult to predict. Kaltman’s prose style is chatty and observant, and she shows herself to be attuned to the emotions of both her human and canine players, as when Paddy tries to get his dog to move on after the death of Paddy’s spouse: “ ‘She’s not coming back,’ Paddy told the dog over and over again, but it did no good. Barney would stare at Paddy blankly, bark once, then curl in on himself and pretend to be asleep.” The plot moves along quickly, cycling through short sections that focus on individual characters. It isn’t long before the reader is caught up in the trysts and trials of these flawed suburban dwellers.
A fun and often funny tale of intersecting lives.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73-346634-9
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Word West, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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