An intriguing, if overly brief, story of a workplace and its workers.
In Savage’s novella, a textile mill offers hope and hardship to those looking to make a quick buck.
This three-part work opens in 1948 with 17-year-old Floyd hoping to find a summer job. Blake Silk Mill offers him work as a “bobbin boy,” monotonously cleaning empty spools of yarn. His colleagues George Klumpfer and Maggie O’Hara attempt “to demonize, demoralize and disturb him,” because they see him as their inferior. Floyd leaves the mill to serve in Korea but returns after his tour of duty. A twist of fate leads him to become the protégé of “the chemist,” a man who trains him for a new role as “tester” in which he’ll be subordinate to no one. Book 2 opens in 1971, with 16-year-old Chris Tiller looking for work at what is now Blake Textile Mill; he, too, works as a bobbin boy. George is now a spiteful superintendent and Maggie a poisonous “floorlady.” Book 3 revisits the mill in 2001, charting the decline of the industry and its employees’ faltering dreams. Savage’s novella smartly and succinctly captures the power of mid-20th-century American industry as Floyd marvels at the seemingly inexorable might of the mill: “a symphony of auditory revolutions that made the boy wonder if every gosh-darned factory on the East Coast had somehow had its sound piped into the hallways of this five-story roar-a-torium!” As the novella progresses, this sense of might is replaced by a lingering one of impermanence, as when Chris is told that “these places are all gonna be empty before too long.” Savage has a laconic writing style but regularly entertains with his unique descriptive approach: “The freight elevator moved as if it was being pushed by a couple of dying elephants.” However, the novella feels considerably underdeveloped; Floyd’s war years, for instance, are dealt with in just a few sentences, offering no satisfying sense of how they affected him. That said, this is largely a thoughtful tale that evocatively describes the American manufacturing peak and decline on a deeply human level.
An intriguing, if overly brief, story of a workplace and its workers.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9798350901948
Page Count: 200
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
