An ambitious first novel whose intriguing parts never fully come together into a satisfying whole.
A young Diné man fleeing a tragic past encounters an equally fraught present.
Six months after his younger brother Kai’s drowning death, Damien, a restaurant chef who’s still wracked by grief at that loss and the earlier unexplained disappearances of his parents, quits his job and departs on a hallucinatory journey that will transport him to an environment even more discomfiting than the one he’s desperate to escape. That setting is an impoverished seaside village where Damien is drawn into the complex dynamics of a family of three women—Ana María and her daughters Paola and Marta—who themselves are mourning the recent murder of their daughter and sibling, Carla. Damien goes to work in the family’s makeshift food service operation on the beach, and he’s soon exposed to the sisters’ suspicions that their mother was involved in both Carla’s death and the earlier disappearance of their father at sea. Paola and Marta try to enlist Damien in their plots and counterplots against their despised mother, who exerts a sort of domination over the village owing largely to her unexplained ability to replenish a fish supply decimated by overfishing. The clashes among these three women, who may be brujas, climax in the chaos of an apocalyptic hurricane that’s described in terrifying detail. Basham’s debut novel is complex and enigmatic, featuring a mythic sensibility and elements of magical realism, including the early stages of Damien’s metamorphosis into a fish and other characters’ taking on the physical characteristics of lizards and insects. The novel’s prose is lush and evocative, and there’s an almost erotic charge to Basham’s writing about food, a central element in the story. He tries to give the novel a larger thematic resonance by alluding to the tragedy of the Long Walk—the dispossession of Damien’s ancestors, some 10,000 members of the Navajo (Diné) tribe in the 1860s—as well as the impact of climate change.
An ambitious first novel whose intriguing parts never fully come together into a satisfying whole.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9780063241084
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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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