Expect sharp observations and fluid prose; don’t expect a sense of humor. Dey’s characters take themselves very seriously.
Dey, a Canadian playwright and novelist, offers a detailed account of family relations when the father is a famous writer.
Narrator Mona Dean, herself a playwright, sums up the whole novel early on: “I had never gotten over my childhood.” Eighteen years earlier, when Mona was 11, her father, Paul, left her mother, Natasha, for his second wife, Cherry. Cherry poisoned him against Mona and her older sister, Juliet, so both girls, like their mother, suffered abandonment. Mona still suffers. A former boxer whose critically acclaimed novel shares the title of Dey’s, Paul comes across as a horrible hybrid of Mailer and Hemingway. (Not coincidentally, Mona performs in her own one-woman play about Hemingway’s doomed granddaughter, Margot; its first line is “To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.”) Mona’s internal dialogue dominates. Even when other characters’ perspectives are offered in occasional third-person descriptions, one senses that Mona, like a novelist, is imagining them to support her own belief that Cherry is an evil stepmother and Eva, Paul and Cherry’s daughter, a malignant half sister. Along with bouts of extreme grief, depression, and jealousy, Mona suffers a litany of trials: her parents’ divorce, an abortion at 15, rape in graduate school, a pregnancy ending in a stillbirth followed by a life-threatening medical crisis. Each incident is real and traumatic, but together the list feels like authorial overkill. So does Mona’s frequent self-congratulation. She makes it clear that she’s renowned for her talent and beauty and crows about her handsome and adoring partner; her loyal, remarkably forgiving best friend; and the unwavering support she’s received from Natasha and Juliet. As for Paul, Mona (or the author) can’t help excusing the wishy-washy narcissist because the poor guy has been manipulated by Cherry and is tortured over his writing. Actually, everyone in this novel is tortured.
Expect sharp observations and fluid prose; don’t expect a sense of humor. Dey’s characters take themselves very seriously.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780374609702
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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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