The resilience of sisterly bonds forms the backbone of this swirling, heart-wrenching debut.
A captivating rendition of early-20th-century El Salvador.
Graciela and her four closest friends grow up on a coffee plantation nestled on a volcano, surrounded by the “joyful ferocity” of their mothers’ love. Their lives on the estate are simple but vibrant. They think little of men, including their fathers, until a man from the capital comes looking for Graciela. Her absent father was the second-in-command and spiritual adviser to the ambitious general referred to as El Gran Pendejo, and he has died. She is summoned to the capital to pay her respects and there meets her long-lost sister, Consuelo, who was kidnapped from their village by her father as a gift for his barren wife. Both now trapped under the thumb of the general, the two reluctantly grow close until El Gran Pendejo, who has bloated into a full-fledged dictator, unleashes unspeakable terror on the nation’s Indigenous population. The inhabitants of their home village are massacred, including Graciela’s childhood friends, who narrate this tale from beyond the grave. In prose that, while supple, does not stray from the harshness of history, the voices of these four murdered girls unite in a ghostly chorus to project the story of their friend and her sister, survivors of genocide. Their visions of Graciela and Consuelo are riveting; the two women, both striking characters, build physically separate but spiritually linked lives in California and Paris in the 1930s. Balibrera eulogizes the lives lost in La Matanza, the real-life 1932 massacre of the Pipil people by the Salvadoran government, and underscores the value of holding one’s culture close, even when it threatens to disrupt just-scarring wounds. Despite the singular narratives sanctioned by those in power, “every myth, every story, has at least two versions,” and “if you don’t tell it properly, if you say it too quietly, you erase everyone’s face as you go.”
The resilience of sisterly bonds forms the backbone of this swirling, heart-wrenching debut.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593317235
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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