A sensitive and engaging portrait of an important time and place.
A novel welcomes readers to the late 1960s, when militant idealism flourished.
It’s the ’60s, and Vietnam War issues are roiling campuses; the Black Panthers are in the news; and a group of college kids, led by Jill Levy and David Levinski, has moved to an old farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. The cohorts will enjoy the simple life, hone their idealism, and plan protests. Fortunately, they have the farm’s wise, older former owners, Leland and Mary Smith, to befriend and ground them. The students squabble at times, and some townspeople are dangerously hostile, but they are surviving, making a go of it. Then Mark, a radicalized and charismatic Vietnam veteran, shows up and convinces Jill and others to bring the war home (think Weather Underground). David, wanting no part of such violence, stays on the farm. He is still there when Jill returns, on the run. The surprises come thick and fast in the dramatic climax. Chodorkoff is a very accomplished writer. The plot is strong, and the characters are well drawn. That said, Jill is also a recognizable type. She’s a daughter of privilege, with her father a well-known liberal lawyer and their Upper East Side apartment a Manhattan salon where they often entertain radicals. David, by contrast, is a middle-class kid lacking Jill’s overweening confidence and self-righteousness. It is all too easy to see how she could come to doubt and even ridicule David’s tentativeness and his ideological unease and how she could be seduced (literally and figuratively) by Mark, who is quick to save his own skin by giving her up to the feds. The author has David narrate most of the engrossing book, but the story is interspersed with Jill’s passages. She largely ruminates on her and David’s relationship and her ideological enthusiasms (and cluelessness). Along the way, readers will learn what year-round life is like in the Northeast Kingdom and the hard work and rewards of maple sugaring. And they will discover at the end that David is a real mensch. But they probably suspected that from the get-go.
A sensitive and engaging portrait of an important time and place. (Short bio, list of books by the publisher.)Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947917-81-1
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2022
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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