Mystical, gripping, rooted in the land—Brown may bang a little too hard on the keys, but he plays a compelling tune.
A novel of place, myth, and clashing loyalties set in 1980s Penobscot, Maine.
Shortly after a team of Japanese investors visits a local paper mill with an eye toward reopening it, a 14-year-old member of the Penobscot Nation burns the building to the ground and disappears. The act sows discord through the economically challenged region. Enraged by the loss of prospective jobs, some demand swift vengeance for the perpetrator. Others, like the narrator’s mother, Falon Ames, who runs a local newspaper, argue that the event must be seen in its larger context; the mill, after all, had hardly been “an innocent victim”; its former owners had “knowingly discharged toxic chemicals and wastewater products…into the river, poisoning its fish and plants.” This dichotomy—between a mystical appreciation for the natural world and the environmentally extractive nature of work and industry—pervades Brown’s beautiful if uneven debut. While the arsonist and her father struggle to survive off the land as fugitives, Penobscot Bay lobsterman Lyman Creel inaugurates a parallel land-industry drama: Convinced that un-fished waters are wasted waters, Lyman lays his traps in the mouth of the Penobscot River, an act of overreach (the river rights belong to the Penobscot Nation) that helps motivate the narrator and his twin brother to begin sabotaging Lyman’s traps. Like many debuts, Brown’s first novel is imperfect. His dialogue sometimes veers toward preciousness at the expense of character development; his characters are often too accurately aware of the wider themes that shape their lives (“Some places are like portals to eternity,” says the narrator’s uncle. “You stand in them and look around, and you feel how long and unending the world is. You become a part of something beyond time. Maybe this is one of those places”); and the plot moves through increasingly convenient contortions as it hurtles toward its foreseeable crescendo. Yet despite these shortcomings, Brown tells a gripping tale. And in his hands the Penobscot region of the 1980s and '90s—with its eccentric cast of Vietnam veterans, hippy fugitives, gruff lobstermen, and Penobscot tribal members—comes wonderfully to life.
Mystical, gripping, rooted in the land—Brown may bang a little too hard on the keys, but he plays a compelling tune.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06299-413-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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