The fans rejoice.
A late-breaking 10th installment in the beloved Tales of the City series.
In 1978, we met a landlady named Anna Madrigal with a rooming house on Barbary Lane in San Francisco. Among her boarders were a lovable gay man named Michael Tolliver and a bohemian bisexual woman named Mona Ramsay, in whom Anna seemed to take a rather maternal interest, which made sense when we eventually found out that pre-transition, she was Mona’s father. (Even if you only watched the TV series, you know all this.) After moving the story as far as Anna’s 93rd birthday in The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014), Maupin returns now with an installment set in the 1990s, when Anna was only 73, and focusing on a character who’s been AWOL for a while. Turns out Mona Ramsay’s lavender marriage to the now-deceased Lord Teddy Roughton left her with a sprawling estate in the Cotswolds. Lady Mona has also acquired an adopted gay son; 26-year-old Wilfred identifies as native Australian—“Aborigine, with some Dutch thrown in”—and the two are soon running Easley House as a country lodge. As the book opens, Rhonda and Eddie Blaylock of North Carolina arrive. Eddie has just headed up Jesse Helms’ reelection campaign, though the senator has been snubbing him since then. When Rhonda suggests Helms is not a nice man, Eddie throws a casserole dish at her. Her concealer stick doesn’t cover the damage, and Mona and Wilfred get involved. Other plotlines feature Poppy the postmistress, Mona’s sometime girlfriend, who wants to paint Mona underwater in the style of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; George Michael, whom Wilfred encounters briefly at a London cruising spot with a condom table; and Michael Tolliver and Anna Madrigal themselves, popping in for a visit just in time for the Midsummer party. Though AIDS sits large upon the land, the characters are determined to enjoy what time they have, both in and out of bed. When Mona laments all the gorgeous hunks already lost, Michael replies, “I know plenty of ugly guys who died of AIDS.” Pure Maupin.
The fans rejoice.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780062973597
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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