A moving and compelling tale of a journey toward truth and personal liberation.
An aging lesbian finally discovers and voices her truth in Skipstone’s novel.
Taylor Baird MacKenzie is a long-term substitute teacher and writer in the conservative, rural Alaskan town of Clear.At 70, she remains closeted, and she’s been unhappily married to a man for four decades. Her “greatest happiness” is to stealthily publish erotically charged lesbian romance novels loosely based on her own history. She disguises herself with a pseudonym inspired by her former lover Brooke Skipstone, who was murdered in the 1970s (and who shares a name with the author of this novel). Through her novels’ fearless female characters, she gives voice to her own truest desires and outspoken perspectives. Over time, however, she feels that keeping her secret has “suffocated her life”; her troubles are only exacerbated by the prison release of her dangerous brother, Austin, who seeks to settle an old score. MacKenzie has been fearful of coming out since Brooke’s death, but a catharsis has made her brave enough to author an autobiography; also, her queer student Grace has figured out her secret and befriends her. However, Grace’s anti-gay podcaster father, Levi Mitchell, has discovered MacKenzie’s books and launches a campaign against her. Grace welcomes the fight and meets Levi’s vitriol (and legacy of abuse) with her own brand of fierce activism. Over the course of this novel, Skipstone’s prose is propulsive, moving a rousing story from past to present at a fast clip. The characters are developed well, and their vivid personalities make them feel like real people. The author’s firm grasp of LGBTQ+ issues and of the queer community’s fight for equality is effectively amplified. As an antagonist, Levi comes across as appropriately frenzied and hateful, while Grace will strike readers as appealingly defiant. Overall, it’s an impressive story that packs a punch.
A moving and compelling tale of a journey toward truth and personal liberation.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781737006466
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Skipstone Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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