A snapshot of a generation hopelessly conscious of their parents’ failures, at a loss as to how to proceed.
Shin’s unforgettable debut novel follows 30-something Kai as he navigates a painful breakup in Seoul.
Spending his evenings drinking in late-night bars and engaging in fleeting affairs with both men and women, Kai attempts to stave off the loneliness that’s hounded him since his partner left. He treks up a mountain in a snowstorm, ill-equipped and overcome with a kind of manic, reckless abandon. He visits his recently separated parents, brooding over their decision to part ways. He trespasses on his brother’s self-imposed isolation in hopes of rekindling their bond. Though his existential angst is poignant, his cynical derision toward others and morally dubious behavior makes him an unsympathetic protagonist. (Several of his sexual liaisons take a decidedly dark turn, forcing the reader to ponder the implications of a power imbalance in the bedroom—and Kai’s capacity for abuse.) Obsessively agonizing over his partner’s desertion, Kai becomes increasingly nihilistic—an ethos shared by his close friends, all of whom are facing their own crises. The perspective occasionally switches from Kai to his various friends, revealing not only their mixed feelings toward him but the toll that loveless relationships, addiction, violence, and warped self-image have taken on millennials. Shin suggests that the thread connecting their suffering is a sense of aimlessness, an inexorable void that none of them seem able to fill. Given that most of the characters are unlikable and the novel’s milieu is relentlessly bleak, the reader can’t be expected to feel a great deal of sympathy for Kai or his friends. But the skill with which the novel is crafted—blurring the distinctions between daydream, fantasy, and reality with lilting, metaphorical prose—is undeniable. Shin reinforces the directionless felt by her characters with a meandering, wonderfully unhurried plot. In the same way, the sense of disorientation prompted in the reader by the book’s shifting perspective and formal experimentation is undoubtedly designed to mirror the uncertainty felt by the characters. Shin masterfully locates the individual struggle to find meaning within a broader discourse, tussling with notions of class, gender, sexuality, generational divides, and war.
A snapshot of a generation hopelessly conscious of their parents’ failures, at a loss as to how to proceed.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781662602221
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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