A gritty music story/romance with an endearing narrator.
A novel focuses on the journey of a washed-up rock star who becomes an unlikely father figure.
Damen Warner is the frontman for the band OBNXS, which has just been dumped by its label. Damen lives with a motley crew of roommates and a rooster in Chicago who are on a downward spiral: “It hadn’t taken long for” the band’s “bad habits to settle into a routine…boozing and jamming,” messing around with “dancers and drugs…until the sun came up and the whole cycle started over again.” But there is hope for the group when an investor agrees to help fund its next project. Though Damen’s career has taken a positive turn, his personal life is in upheaval. He has fraught dealings with his family; he is struggling to get inspiration for his latest album; and he is unclear about the terms of his relationship with Melody, a stripper at a club he frequents. When he is called in to babysit Melody’s daughter, Victoria, at the last minute, he begins to form a bond with the girl, instructing her to stand up to school bullies and even taking her trick-or-treating. As he and the band try to record a new album, they join forces with a millennial blogger who helps OBNXS go viral, capitalizing on Damen’s public escapades. But Damen and Melody’s relationship is tested as he struggles to cope with her clients and Victoria’s father, a rich guy who hates the musician and wants to take the child from her mother. In this engaging, well-crafted sequel, Damen’s narrative voice is distinct, raw, and cynical, just right for a 30-year-old rock star trying to get back on top. Gebien establishes Damen’s voice from the very first page. The protagonist warns readers: “Well, congratulations. It’s all downhill from here. You don’t have to turn back—it’s a free country. You can do what you want. Go ahead and stare at the sun while you’re at it: it will probably cause less damage to your retinas than the escalating indecency ahead. Still here? God help you.” But for all the discussion of Damen’s rock dreams, he doesn’t make much music throughout the course of the book. This is one rich area that could have been further explored.
A gritty music story/romance with an endearing narrator.Pub Date: July 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-578-38589-1
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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