Pride and Piazza ask hard questions about race and what it means to be a mother.
Long-hidden secrets and trauma threaten two women’s plans for their lives.
Pride and Piazza, the duo behind We Are Not Like Them (2021), a thought-provoking and popular-with-book-clubs treatment of race and interracial friendships, advance that conversation with a contemporary story about race and mothering. Cinnamon Haynes, a 34-year-old community college counselor, lives with her (unsuccessful) entrepreneur husband, Jayson. Cinnamon survived for years as a Black child in the foster care system and still deals with its painful legacy. One coping mechanism she employs is to avoid revealing her background to most people, including her best friend, Lucia, and Jayson. When Cinnamon strikes up a casual but genuine friendship with Daisy, a 19-year-old White woman she's taken to meeting every Friday in a local park for lunch, the stakes are raised dramatically in Cinnamon’s game of escaping her past. Daisy, who carries several secrets of her own, upends Cinnamon’s carefully constructed facade when she designs a plan for Cinnamon to “accidentally” find and then raise the baby daughter she's given birth to after a concealed pregnancy (and her flight from the area). Reluctant to subject anyone else to the conditions and experiences she suffered in the care system, Cinnamon struggles to balance her increasing affection for the blue-eyed baby—whom she refers to as Bluebell—against the social and personal factors weighing against her becoming Bluebell’s adoptive mother. Pride and Piazza’s narrative offers myriad opportunities for reflections on interracial adoption, the loss of cultural and racial legacy in those adoptions, and what is truly in the best interest of the child. The slow reveal of Cinnamon’s journey allows for varying points of view to be shared, including those of friends, spouses, mothers-in-laws, and social workers, as well as the motivations of both Cinnamon and Daisy.
Pride and Piazza ask hard questions about race and what it means to be a mother.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781668005507
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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