An affirmational novel that maps out a mystical but insubstantial trek.
Clovis hastens readers along the path to enlightenment in this short spiritual work.
In this book’s framing device, the reader is lost in a dark forest. Luckily, they have a guide, a companion, someone to point out life’s brilliant mysteries and remind the reader to breathe. “OUR story is the journey of the state of grace,” writes this comrade and narrator, who always renders pronouns in all-caps. “OUR path unfolds with the light already within US. OUR inner flashlight is guiding US. Gratitude is the flashlight within. All that matters in the next step into the darkness of the forest.” As the reader moves through the forest with their guide, they’re treated to affirmations regarding their place in the universe, symbolic lessons tied to butterflies and waterfalls, and cosmic considerations related to the vastness of space and time. While it’s easy to lose one’s path in the dark forest, says the narrator, the reader shouldn’t worry too much, as there is a Creator whose light burns within them. But, the narrator asks, what will happen when the forest falls away and one finds oneself back in the real world? Clovis writes with urgency and lyricism, with her prose, at its best, evoking a kind of Old Testament–style poetry: “For the Earth is an old piece of clay with thousands of thumbprints. And white brushstrokes paint the dusk of evening sky as God is indeed the magnificent painter and sculptor of the universe leaving a portrait of three billion stars and a supermassive black hole.” Although the book bills itself as a “Meditative Novel,” it is not a novel in any traditional sense. For example, each chapter is only a paragraph long, and fully half the pages are blank; there’s no plot or differentiated characters, and the setting is an allegorical forest with few distinguishing details other than darkness. With little to hold onto other than Clovis’ repetitive affirmations, readers will likely fight the urge not to slip away into the trees—as, unfortunately, there’s little to be gained by following the path to the end.
An affirmational novel that maps out a mystical but insubstantial trek.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9798765241028
Page Count: 116
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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