An intriguing but brooding coming-of-age tale.
In this debut novel, a young woman’s search for details about her dead mother leads her to a guitar hero.
February 1988. As the winter wind blows through the pines of Eastern North Carolina, 18-year-old Luna Kane sits with her dying great-grandfather. The man has not spoken for nine years, not since Luna’s mother died by suicide, but he now delivers his final words—cryptic sentences about owls and music. The words spark a long-buried memory in Luna: an image of her hippie mother, Claudia, and a black-and-white photograph of a rock star. “The two of them were intertwined in my mind’s eye,” narrates Luna, “like ashes wafting in a summer wind, waiting for water to receive them. I was born of water and moonlight, and of her and of him.” The rock star is Jimmy Page, the legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist. As a high school graduation present, Luna’s uncle gives her a copy of Jimmy’s first solo record, which prompts a fainting spell and another vision. It seems Jimmy’s music is a means to unlock the secrets of Claudia’s life, granting Luna access to the mother she barely knew. To find out the whole truth about Claudia and her own origins, Luna will have to go to England and meet the man himself. Despite the pop culture premise, Hallberg treats the story with absolute seriousness, delving into the complex psychologies of Luna and her mother. The prose is sometimes overwrought, but always moody and surprising, as here when Luna examines the residence where the Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died: “I stared at the main house. There were others on the estate, by the banks of the Thames, the river’s edge, swans floating in the freezing water. Swan song for a drummer. What about the owls? Had there been owls crying in the night when Bonzo died, hovering at the window, watching him, waiting? Where had Jimmy been?” The novel is strangely gripping, and fans of Led Zeppelin, in particular, will enjoy how the author has woven the band’s mythology through Luna’s odyssey. Unfortunately, it treads too often into melodrama. Readers just want to have fun, but Hallberg and Luna aren’t interested in levity.
An intriguing but brooding coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60489-292-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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