Like the ghosts who inhabit its pages, the novel lingers long after you’ve put it down.
A ghost story that focuses not on a single spirit but on an entire city whose layered history haunts its occupants.
“Meg had the unsettling sense that she was seeing all the layers of the city transposed over one another, like scrims in a play going haywire.” Meg Rhys proudly carries her “Spinster Librarian card” and does not believe in love, thank you very much. Instead she believes in ghosts, and in New York City there is no shortage of phantasmal company. Haunted by (accompanied by?) the ghost of her sister, who died at 25, Meg armors herself with the weapons that might otherwise be used to attack her: She’s 40 and single, she’s a librarian, and she has a cat named Virginia Wolf (a misspelling only Meg finds funny as well as a wink toward Shearn’s fondness for multi-comma’d sentences). When handsome Ellis Williams approaches Meg at her Brooklyn library to help him uncover the truth about a rental property his father owns in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the circumstances seem ripe for a traditional romantic comedy—that is if their trauma and grief weren’t compounded by the occult. The two of them undertake an obsessive research project as they peel back the layers of the house, and the city itself. Largely focused on Meg, the omniscient narrator occasionally switches to the perspective of a young Black girl whose story is slowly revealed. At times Shearn’s exploration of topics as weighty as gentrification, police brutality, and Black trauma comes off oversimplified and overfiltered by the White heroine. That said, it is clear that Shearn has done her research—and details about the free Black settlement Weeksville in particular are treated with sensitivity and knowledge. Ultimately, the novel is as much a haunting by the geography of New York as it is the story of a few souls who live—or have lived—there.
Like the ghosts who inhabit its pages, the novel lingers long after you’ve put it down.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59709-367-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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