A sensitive and moving tale of family tragedy and renewal.
A novel focuses on a family fractured by a series of shocks and secrets.
Eddy Kimes, one of the main characters in Seaburn’s tale, is a longtime supervisor for a cable company. Although he’s lived through many changes of company ownership, as the story opens, he’s increasingly worried that this latest pause in work is actually the dreaded L-word: layoff. This problem comes on top of the concern now undergirding his entire life: His wife, Gayle, a tax accountant with a booming business, has recently been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and suddenly she’s requiring medicine, extra care, and chemotherapy. This development brings home their two adult children, Richie and Sandy, who have become almost strangers in the time since they moved out of the family house. “There were Facebook posts and texts and the rare visits, but it was different in ways that he couldn’t put into words,” Eddy reflects. “All he knew was that they had become warm, affable acquaintances, people you enjoyed but didn't know.” Richie and Sandy are carrying their own baggage. While Eddy is trying to hold the situation together alone (“Sometimes you have to keep things to yourself,” he thinks, “otherwise, everything might crash into a million pieces on the floor”), he’s receiving a surprising amount of support from his visits to the statue of Christ the Consoler at the nearby First Presbyterian Church. At one point in Seaburn’s engaging story, readers are told: “Every person’s suffering is singular, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise.” And yet the tale’s main theme belies this sentiment; the book is a poignant and convincing portrayal of how suffering can be softened by both faith and community. The author’s dramatization of the day-to-day realities of living with cancer is etched with fine details and deep compassion. Without any fanfare, this element of the novel comes to dominate the others, tilting a faith and relationship tale into an illness and coping story that explores powerful emotions.
A sensitive and moving tale of family tragedy and renewal.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68-433764-4
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2021
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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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