by Gregory D. Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2024
Earnest, memorable tales grounded in life’s joys, pains, and challenges.
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Williams, a short-story writer, poet, and medical doctor, relates the lives of boys and men in this posthumously published short-story collection.
This compilation includes works previously published in various literary magazines (including the Blue Mesa Review) and journals, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association. It’s split into three sections that appear to represent male youth, adolescence, and adulthood, respectively. They feature 12 emotionally resonant tales of male bonding, adventure, and interpersonal melodrama, primarily narrated in the first person. The moving, 1960s-set “Rounding the Bases” follows two young best friends, a boy and girl who manage to endure a searing tragedy through their mutual love of baseball and, in delicate gestures of friendship, each other. Also in the opening section is the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize–winning story “Who We Were at Twelve,” which demonstrates Williams’ deft ability to channel the minds and hearts of an adolescent and a neighborhood bully, complete with all the trepidation, silliness, and recklessness one expects. The author was an anesthesiologist, which enriches the volume’s center portion in pieces such as “Section,” about a physician learning that his child might be born with a disability. Others with medical themes include “Playing Doctor” and the Pushcart Prize–nominated “What the Doctor Didn’t Know,” both focused on clinical professionals with critical choices to make. The third section features a broken husband in “Comp” who, despite a deflated marriage, still admits that he loves his wife, Annie—even as he weighs the possibilities of infidelity. Grief effectively permeates the sorrowful “Three Strides to Thirty,” set at a dog-racing track where the narrator remembers taking his beloved, now-deceased wife. Closing the collection is “Rainbow Trout,” an allegorical tale of a fisherman and a sage fish with advice to dispense, which was Williams’s first attempt at writing fiction, inspired by his father’s death. Overall, the stories are thematically harmonious and feature many arresting moments, and Williams’ storytelling talents will leave readers moved, amused, and reflective, by turns.
Earnest, memorable tales grounded in life’s joys, pains, and challenges.Pub Date: April 11, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Grand Canyon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2024
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”
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New York Times Bestseller
A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.
Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780316258876
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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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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New York Times Bestseller
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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