This unsparing version of the modern American tragedy is more fun to read than can possibly be right.
A family of South Florida transplants has a shining moment of promise, then the hard times start rolling in.
As the book opens, C.C. Borkoski is at an engagement party being thrown by her wealthy future in-laws, the Wellmans, whose Connecticut home commands a view of Long Island Sound. She is surprised to learn that her mother has been invited—because the guest list was so “lopsided,” her fiance explains. “Your side was basically blank.” “There's a reason for that!” says C.C., shocked to learn her mother even has email, much less that she has RSVP’d that she will be attending. The remainder of this novel will explain what happened to C.C.’s family, people who live in a very different America than the Wellmans. From the engagement party, we flash back to C.C. at 12, at a Florida rest stop eating sliced orange samples. Since her family's used car lot and home in Ohio burned to the ground, they are on their way to a new life. And as it turns out, “Loxahatchee was the best life my childhood self could conceive of.” For a while. But while C.C. gets her first boyfriend and becomes a regional basketball phenom, her big sister, Lorraine, turns into someone she can’t even recognize, and let’s not even start on what happens to her parents or to C.C.’s marriage into the upper crust. The same evocative language and crackerjack storytelling Raymer displayed in her debut memoir, Lay the Favorite (2010), make her debut fiction a richly entertaining read even as the betrayals and misfortunes come raining down. The mythic level of the difficulties that confront the humans in the book are highlighted by C.C.’s job as a marketing writer at a Florida zoo full of animals in desperate straits due to changes in the environment—a homeless shelter, as she thinks of it. As Raymer’s readers, we are like the manatees in the last image of the novel, having a fine old time playing in the warm-water discharge of a power plant at sunset.
This unsparing version of the modern American tragedy is more fun to read than can possibly be right.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780812993165
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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