A noble and ambitious attempt to fuse genre pastiche with queer narratives but one that sometimes fails to connect its...
A young man in 18th-century Britain successively falls for, and must choose between, three different men in this debut historical novel.
Charming, fashionable, erudite, and gay Englishman Hugh Entwistle is portrayed as an ideal man of the 18th century in this novel, which is, in part, an homage to coming-of-age novels of the era in which it’s set, such as Henry Fielding’s 1749 classic Tom Jones. It’s also a work of queer historical archiving that’s as admirable and remarkable as its hero. The preface sets up the conceit that the novel is a period document, a fiction penned by the author’s ancestor about a gay hero; the setup is a great authorly salute to similar openings from past classics, in which the author claims to have stumbled upon a “rusted trunk” with “no lock,” and, lo and behold, the manuscript is found. Novelist Lawrence continues this ruse with fidelity, writing in a facsimile Georgian style, which is the novel’s great achievement and, at times, its great pitfall. Juicy, “Dear Reader” asides establish an air of close confidence as the novel explores the secret gay romances of Hugh and his suitors—the alliterative trio of Bramble, Benjamin, and Brent. Yet there’s a degree to which the style, and the plot itself, get a bit confusing. Scaffolding the novel, as if to mirror the life of the protagonist, is a political history of the radical parliamentarian John Wilkes, which doesn’t seamlessly combine with the story of Hugh’s courting and being courted; likewise, period details of aesthetic philosophy, and particularly philosopher Edmund Burke’s writing on the “sublime,” feel overwrought and even somewhat haughty. More frustrating is the fact that sublime is too narrowly defined as “pleasure at the relief from Pain,” which doesn’t quite capture the scope of Burke’s imagination. Nonetheless, the developing, homoerotic love stories, a snappy courtroom scene, and a delightful final image tilt the scales of the novel closer to pleasure than pain.
A noble and ambitious attempt to fuse genre pastiche with queer narratives but one that sometimes fails to connect its disparate details.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Broadbound Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 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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