A sometimes-engrossing but often self-indulgent tale about polyamory gone awry.
An author disappears in this psychological novel set in contemporary China.
Isham is missing. After publishing naked pictures of his girlfriend/translator on the internet and then beating her up in a Shanghai cafe, the writer has dropped out of view. That’s the story according to Marguerite, the mostly deaf Afghan American rug weaver with a glass bathtub and a prominent mustache. Marguerite attempts to reassemble the tale, for herself and a coterie of admirers. Years ago, author and English teacher Isham began a relationship with Luna, a Chinese woman fluent in English, who also happened to have a mustache. But sex was too painful for Luna for them to consummate the act, which led the pair to a dysfunctional, obsessive, on-again, off-again relationship. All the while, Isham was living with his main girlfriend, Bonnie. When Kitty, a third woman—who also had a mustache—entered the mix, the situation became truly volatile. Unable to share him, Luna and Kitty would eventually spiral into destructive behaviors that would end Isham’s life as he knew it. The erotic thriller has an ambitious, Faulkner-ian structure, at times alternating between the largely summarized adventures of the three lovers and Marguerite’s Scheherazade-like pausing the action to analyze them. The book investigates some intriguing territory, including polyamory and dating practices in China. But the protagonist is an unsalvageable misogynist and fetishist, and Cook’s prose replicates those tendencies. Luna is described as having “a primitively alluring face, a rudely attractive face, a compactly sexual face” while Isham and an American friend are portrayed thusly: “Both were atheists, down-to-earth in temperament, straight talkers, with a fondness for craft ales and voluptuous Asian bodies.” (In addition, the phrase benevolent rape appears at one point as a possible solution to Luna’s problem.) Cook’s past publications have flirted with these same transgressions, and it is possible that he is purposefully leaning into them here for the sake of making readers uncomfortable. But when all the exploitative material is stripped away, there simply isn’t much story left.
A sometimes-engrossing but often self-indulgent tale about polyamory gone awry.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73227-744-1
Page Count: 231
Publisher: Magic Theater Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2020
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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