A well-crafted tale of despair and hope.
In this novel, an aspiring poet with eyesight problems, a baby on the way, and a dark family legacy struggles in Mexico City.
At first, it seems as if the unnamed narrator has a perfectly benign, if annoying, eye condition. He is told that it’s pterygium (and likely caused by the ever growing pollution problem in Mexico City), given eye drops, and sent home. There, he faces his dwindling editing career, his ambitions to be a poet, and a very pregnant wife on maternity leave from her urban planning job. But just as his eye worsens, so does his financial condition, and the pressures of upcoming parenthood lead him to break a lifetime commitment to avoid his shameful family’s weapons-dealing business. He ends up asking his relatives for a job. And this is where a seemingly contained, small slice-of-life story about a frustrated poet and his pregnant wife unveils its hidden depths. The narrator—sometimes called Arthur due to his similarities to poet-turned–arms dealer Arthur Rimbaud—feels his eyesight diminishing and the walls closing in on him. (“The news on TV can best be described as the bastard child of current events and slasher films….The gunfire on the screen makes me wonder if my mother’s gun enterprise is feeding all this drug violence.”) He suffers the humiliation of asking a favor from his abrasive brother, going back to the abhorrent family enterprise, and becoming a part of a vicious, corrupt cycle of destruction that affects a decaying society. His other problems range from the worries of bringing a child into this collapsing world to the misfortunes of editing the prose of a terrible writer. This all builds up to a finale that is a skillful blend of the micro and the macro—the idiosyncrasies of one person’s life and the magnitude of a country’s future. The short novel offers succinct chapters—sometimes just a few lines—in which every word is not only meaningful, but also carefully chosen to smartly match its main character’s status as an editor, a lover of language, and a failed poet. And amid all of the devastation, Morrison manages to deftly weave threads of optimism into the bleak claustrophobia of his story.
A well-crafted tale of despair and hope.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63768-029-2
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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