by Gojan Nikolich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2020
An offbeat, mordantly entertaining but discordant saga of war at its worst and its cutest.
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A small-town Vietnam veteran is beset by PTSD and talking rodent soldiers in this tragicomic fantasia.
Bull River Falls, Colorado, population 875, is experiencing a summer of discontent, with raging forest fires, strangely aggressive wildlife, the Gold Gulch Corporation’s controversial expansion of its ski resort and golf course, and the mysterious gunshot death of a young woman. Surveying it all is Stan Przewalski, the 60-something editor of the Beacon-News, but he’s an unreliable observer. His psychiatric meds barely control his nightmares about Vietnam, which bleed into hallucinatory daytime flashbacks, and he’s alive only because the rope that he recently hanged himself with broke. He takes it in stride when he meets Chaz, a gopher who, thanks to exposure to radioactive testing, can outthink and outtalk most humans and magically shrink large objects—including Stan—down to his foot-long scale. Hallucination or not, Chaz deeply resonates with Stan’s past: He loves 1960s rock and has organized his fellow gophers into an army with miniaturized attack helicopters and fighter jets. Nikolich’s fanciful scenario makes up most of this meandering novel, which consists mainly of Stan wrestling with his Vietnam demons while taking in Chaz’s diminutive parody of human culture and warfare. Stan occasionally joins the gophers’ attacks on Gold Gulch, which is trying to drive them off their land. The resulting yarn is imaginative and often beguiling, like a mashup of Platoon and Gremlins scripted by William S. Burroughs. But it is also awkwardly dissonant, with the gophers’ cartoon antics—“They then synced the upstairs elevator door alarms to the hospital PA system, which had already been programmed by a team of prairie dog sound engineers to play a continuous loop of Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 Woodstock rendition of the Star Spangled Banner”—clashing tonally with Stan’s pitch-black memories of combat. (“I was covered with blood….I walked up to the first one and took his head off. I emptied half the ammo belt into that bunch.”) Many scenes clearly take place in Stan’s dreams or imagination and therefore feel inconsequential and uninvolving. Still, the author is a gifted writer, and when he looks outside Stan’s head—“The old woman and the horse faced into the wind and together they watched the smoke rise and hang in gauzy white sheets above the valley”—his prose is entrancing.
An offbeat, mordantly entertaining but discordant saga of war at its worst and its cutest.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68433-573-2
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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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
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by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
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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
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