A raw, revelatory novel about the ways trauma can shape a life.
In Ember’s debut novel, a real estate agent struggles to prevent her past from sabotaging her present.
Ruby lives under a cloud of anxiety and depression. A successful real estate agent in the Bay Area, she refuses to give in to self-pity, even when an irate stranger spits on her in the middle of traffic: “I have no right to complain about the pain inside my head, my body, my soul,” she claims. “So many people in this world have real suffering that is much worse than mine.” Ruby is haunted by the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother and by a psychotic break she experienced decades ago. She struggles in her romantic life, as she has a tendency to prioritize the needs of the men she dates over her own. As she shepherds annoying and ungrateful clients through potential home purchases—often trying to ignore the addicted and mentally ill people who live on the streets right outside—Ruby fights to get a better hold on her personal and professional relationships. Ultimately, though, the relationship she most needs to figure out is the one she has with herself. The author’s prose captures Ruby’s sharp, obsessive inner monologue, as when she fantasizes about the new man in her life, a Burning Man fan in his 50s named Nate: “It was Sunday and I was scheduled to hold the open house for Ugly-Jacket Lady. I wished I could have stayed with Nate, maybe climbed onto the back of his scooter…I was still high from our encounter, and I couldn’t focus on anything, not that selling real estate requires more thought or consciousness than it takes to drool.” Ember highlights Ruby’s trauma a bit too emphatically—a more subtle introduction of the subject would likely have been more effective—but she effectively dramatizes Ruby’s pathology in a way that demonstrates the intractability of her pain. A short novel at less than 150 pages, this narrative offers a startling and often moving slice of contemporary life.
A raw, revelatory novel about the ways trauma can shape a life.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 150
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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