by Christina Cooke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 2024
Vivid, emotionally intense, and unafraid of the dark.
After her brother's untimely death, a young, queer Jamaican woman living in Canada travels home to Kingston.
Twice during her bumpy attempt to reacquaint herself with the city of her birth, Akúa is accused of having no “broughtupsy”—manners. “ ‘Yuh see dis?’ the woman says, nudging someone beside her. ‘Gyal nuh ’ave no broughtupsy.’ ” Though she was born and lived there until her mother’s death from sickle cell anemia when Akúa was 10, she is now 20 and making her first return visit. It is 1996; the occasion is a sad one. Her 12-year-old brother has also died of sickle cell, and she is returning to spread his ashes. It is the first time she’s seen her older sister, Tamika, since their widowed father left the island for Texas, then Vancouver, taking Akúa with him; Tamika chose to stay on and attend boarding school. As a committed Christian, Tamika is appalled by Akúa's sexuality (she’s just parted ways with a longtime girlfriend), warning her that she will not be accepted. “ ‘They will laugh at you and spit in your face,’ Tamika says. ‘Are you listening? They will stone you. They will bring their machetes and guns. Listen to me, mi seh! They will butcher you in broad daylight then leave you to rot. And the police will pay you no mind.’ ” The style mixes a straightforward simplicity with patois vocabulary and, ultimately, more graphic language after Akúa gets sexually involved with a woman who works in a strip club. As Akúa’s time in Kingston moves forward, as she deposits bits of her brother’s ashes at key locations from her childhood, the story builds to a fierce, then sweetly redemptive, climax. The voice of innocence, the violence, and the sibling dynamics of Cooke’s debut recall Justin Torres’ We the Animals (2011),also a queer coming-of-age story—but this blend of those elements is as unique as a thumbprint.
Vivid, emotionally intense, and unafraid of the dark.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781646221882
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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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
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