Feldman has created a compelling woman who knows her own mind and insists on using it.
Set during the 1950s Red Scare, this novel features Fanny Fabricant, an unlikely heroine who makes a journey from conformity to independence and strength.
Fanny Baum, whose mother died when she was a child, marries Max Fabricant just before he ships off to World War II, and she immediately becomes pregnant with their daughter, Chloe. Unlike the husbands of some other women in Fanny’s circle, Max returns from the war, but Fanny ends up a single mother anyway when Max dies a few years later. Written in the third person, the story unfurls from Fanny’s point of view and, to a lesser extent, Chloe’s. Coaxed by her fearsome “maiden” Aunt Rose, as well as her own ennui and financial straits, Fanny gets a job as a secretary at a company that produces daytime radio serials—don’t call them soap operas. Feldman does a fine job of evoking the 1950s, using language and cultural references to films, books, and, most of all, social mores to make the period spring to life. She brings Fanny into focus through the presence of her loving and traditional extended Jewish family. Fanny’s growing opposition to restrictions on women’s independence drives her narrative. Aunt Rose emerges as a hero, bluntly questioning Fanny’s timidity and subtly encouraging her niece’s growing ambition. Two men vie for Fanny’s attention: Ezra Rapaport, a kind and caring family doctor, and Charlie Berlin, a screenwriter with an acerbic wit and a kind heart. Fanny’s search for who she wants to be evolves into a captivating love story, complicated by the career-destroying threats of the McCarthy era. Chloe, too, grows from a sad little girl missing her daddy to a perceptive young woman.
Feldman has created a compelling woman who knows her own mind and insists on using it.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781250879462
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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