An entertaining beach read, a bit wacky but with plenty of heart.
In Castoro’s madcap novel, a single mother leaves the city for the suburbs and finds herself the target of the community’s chief bully and blackmailer.
Eddie Hest loves living in Detroit and doesn’t want to move, but her landlord has sold the building where she resides. Divorced from her young daughter’s drug-addicted father, Eddie has only 30 days to find a new place for herself and Grace. Eddie has always been a bit of a nonconformist (think purple hair and a variety of tattoos) with a strong streak of independence, but she’s fiercely committed to being a “good mom” to Grace, and that requires setting up a stable home. After borrowing the down payment from her mother, she purchases a small house in Shady Hollow, a Detroit suburb. Once Grace enrolls in fourth grade in her new school and joins the soccer team, Eddie learns how strange her new hometown is. When she picks Grace up from practice, Eddie sees that no adults are there to supervise the children. She emails the coach to ask why the children were left alone. Days later, Eddie is accosted, berated, and threatened by a “Psycho Soccer Mom” who turns out to be the coach’s wife; Eddie is now in the crosshairs of the tyrant of Shady Hollow. (“Never! Ever! Question what he does. Or you’ll have to answer to me!”) Castoro’s imaginatively constructed novel is narrated by Eddie, who records psychiatric “sessions” in an empty room in which she listens only to her own voice; through these recordings, readers follow her string of suburban misadventures as she’s pulled into the bizarre machinations of Psycho Soccer Mom. The narrative is bolstered by an eclectic assembly of secondary characters, and Eddie is an energetic, edgy protagonist. Breezy, conversational, and often biting prose propels the action in an unconventional storyline that manages to be simultaneously absurd and tender, all the while offering a lesson in the power of self-affirmation.
An entertaining beach read, a bit wacky but with plenty of heart.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9798986714257
Page Count: -
Publisher: WunderWay Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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