A searing and innovative allegory for our turbulent times.
In 2014, a visionary 70-year-old man develops a bond with a captive teenage girl that could change both their destinies.
The Prophet, who lives off the grid in a cabin near Lookout Mountain, Alabama, paints his divine visions and sells vegetables, biding his time until God calls him into action to send apocalyptic warnings to the U.S. president. One day, while the Prophet is hunting for supplies for his art projects at the town junkyard, a mysterious car pulls up at the gas station across the road, out of which emerges a bearded man in a vest, a woman with hair the color of a Coca-Cola can, and a teenage girl—who has zip ties on her wrists. The Prophet soon comes to believe that the girl is not only one of God’s “Innocents” but also the “Big Fish,” so he must save her from her captors. After a dramatic rescue, he brings her to his cabin to recuperate, and he realizes that he must send her to the White House with his prophecy about the cosmic battle that will threaten to destroy the U.S. if its people do not repent. A tender friendship develops between the girl, named Michael, and the Prophet as they wrestle with their pasts and the difficult choices they must make about the future. Tarrying in the background is the Two-Step Devil, hissing doubt about the Prophet’s and the girl’s divine destinies. Or, perhaps, Two-Step is merely telling the truth that the Prophet (and the rest of humanity) is too arrogant or afraid to reckon with: “The first humans did not fall; they rose. I lifted them into personhood,” the Devil chillingly asserts. By alternating between perspectives and pushing the novel’s formal boundaries, Quatro daringly explores the evils and mercies, large and small, that steer the courses of human lives.
A searing and innovative allegory for our turbulent times.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780802163134
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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