A powerful story of personal failure and reinvention.
Guida’s novel chronicles one man’s journey from failure to redemption as a cop in mid-20th-century New York.
When readers meet Alfie Baliato, the central character of this poignant, powerful novel, it’s 1968. He and his fellow New York City police officers are charged with ending the student antiwar protests at Columbia University—a task that many cops see as an opportunity to inflict pain on those they see as pot-smoking, overprivileged hippie college kids. Mixed with the white cops’ anger is intense racism and a lurking fear of the well-armed Black Panthers, who are part of the protests. As Alfie watches his colleagues use brute force against unarmed college students, he has second thoughts about the life he’s chosen; when he’s badly injured in the line of duty, his life is suddenly altered. In the pages that follow, readers effectively come to understand that the sources of Alfie’s doubts result from a life marred by traumatic experiences, shattered dreams, and disastrous choices. As a child in upstate Rome, New York, he witnessed terrible racial violence in which his father and a Black minister friend were horrifically beaten. Later, the Baliatos move closer to their extended family in an Italian American section of Brooklyn, and Alfie’s love for his first cousin Adeline, his unfulfilled dreams of a music career, and his indifferent marriage drive him toward a cynical, resigned view of life: “It had taken Alfie a long time to see what his father had always seemed to know and accept. Nobody was free.” However, the most powerful aspect of this novel is the author’s insistence that no one’s life is beyond redemption and that change is always possible, even if dreams never fully translate into reality. Set mostly in Brooklyn during the 1950s and ’60s, the book vividly renders the daily life and values of a particular urban community, and the characters feel real throughout. Readers will gladly travel with Alfie through the sometimes-devastating but always interesting moments of his life.
A powerful story of personal failure and reinvention.Pub Date: March 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781771838818
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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