A stark, grim portrait of despair.
A Kurdish family is trapped in a mother’s madness.
Ojen, a film and television actor, sets her bleak third novel—the first to be translated into English—in a desolate village in her native Turkey. A storm rages, and Selma is snowbound in a small, rudimentary lojman, a house provided by the government for her husband, Metin, the elementary school’s teacher. The house is isolated, “a forgotten dot on the village’s suffocating landscape, distant and alone under the dark clouds,” and Metin has gone off, leaving her with their pubescent daughter, Görkem, their young son, Murat, and the baby to whom she gives birth as the novel opens. Ojen conveys in visceral detail the anguish of the family’s claustrophobic imprisonment in the “crushing grayness” of the lojman, where the storm’s rage echoes the rage within: Görkem hates her mother, whose moods veer from “unanticipated bliss” to violent anger. And Selma, longing for passion, poetry, and freedom, feels nothing but hatred for her children: “Her children were parasites!” she thinks. “They were nothing but maggots that had first depleted her calcium deposits, then plundered the most sensitive parts of her soul to take them as their own, pinning the features of her body onto theirs.” She resents caring for them, even feeding them. She sees Görkem as “a monster who always demanded more of everything. Of food, love, anger, forgiveness, enmity.” Her hungry infant seems to suck her dry. It is the gentle Murat who soothes the baby when his mother, and sister, refuse to care for him. Day by day, as the weather becomes increasingly brutal, Selma descends into madness: “She felt like a shipwreck lodged in the deep, dark seafloor. Caught in the tides of her thoughts, watching her life force wither.” The children are caught, too, as is the reader, spiraling into a surreal world.
A stark, grim portrait of despair.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780872868984
Page Count: 220
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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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