A funny and occasionally touching novel about rebuilding your life after a crisis.
A woman and her former friend run rival support groups in Levin’s comic novel.
Hunter Fitzgerald suffers one indignity after the next. First, she loses her job when the fitness center she manages shuts down. Then her husband, Peter, leaves her for her newly sober friend, Angelica, a longtime partier and sponge whose memoir has just hit the bestseller list. Peter tries to sell their house out from under her just as Hunter realizes he’s destroyed her credit by maxing out credit cards in her name. Finally, while working at her new job at a Starbucks, Hunter learns that Angelica has trashed her in the memoir, accusing Hunter of allowing Angelica to get raped while they were out drinking one night. Hunter’s luck finally changes when, during an oppressively foggy day at a Bay Area flea market, she acquires a “talking stick” from a mysterious woman in an airstream trailer. “It was given to me by a woman I knew in an artists’ colony in New Mexico,” the woman tells her. “It’s been passed down from mother to daughter and used in female-only groups. Sometimes to settle a dispute among the women.” Upon receiving the stick, Hunter knows immediately what she needs to do: form a for-profit support group for women focusing on physical and emotional health. The first meeting, held at Hunter’s now for-sale house, attracts a not-quite-promising group of three, including Penelope, an elderly hypochondriac obsessed with dying; Dannika, a young woman who can’t get into college and is still mourning her dead mother; and Alicia, an OB-GYN who refuses to date out of concern for her teenage daughter. Meanwhile, Peter—who also retains access to the house—allows Angelica to use it to start her own, larger support group, the Fourteenth Step, in the room next to Hunter’s group. Despite her reservations, Hunter sticks it out with her sad trio, and the four of them begin to help one another get past the barriers that have been keeping them from happiness. But can they help Hunter save her house from Angelica’s growing army of supportees?
Levin writes with tenderness and humor, capturing the particular insecurities of each character. Here, Dannika hopes that friendships will develop between the members of the group, even as she frets about being judged by the other women: “Penelope’s house was a little closer to Dannika’s, but it was even swankier than Hunter’s, which made her feel embarrassed about her own place, with its old, cat-and-dust-covered furniture. True, the talking-stick women probably wouldn’t visit her often. Or ever.” Hunter, a California Republican and proud atheist who collects potentially valuable Barbies that she finds at flea markets, is a memorable and utterly believable character. It’s a pleasure to see her heart softened by the equally specific members of her support group. The book is perhaps longer than it needs to be at nearly 400 pages, but readers will enjoy the extra time they get to spend with these characters.
A funny and occasionally touching novel about rebuilding your life after a crisis.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781648210310
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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