A provocative story about youth culture during the 1960s, overflowing with sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
A small-town British girl relocates to London, where she gets involved with a fast crowd that introduces her to psychedelic drugs, free love, and complicated questions.
In 1960s England, Claire Collins has long yearned to leave rural Dorset and build a bigger life full of glamour. When her widowed father remarries, her desire to hit the road only intensifies. After a particularly nasty fight with her stepmother, Claire boards the first train to London with little more than pocket money and determination. After a dicey beginning, she finds lodging in a hostel and a job working as a shopgirl. Then she meets John McKenna, a young man with connections to the burgeoning British music scene. Before long, John is introducing Claire to one celebrity after another, well-known musicians and famous groupies. On a whim, Claire’s new famous friends bring her to Morocco, where she meets Talitha Getty, the wife of enormously wealthy Paul Getty. As Claire falls under the dizzying spell of riches and nonstop parties, she tries everything her new friends offer her, from LSD to opium and orgies. The more deeply entrenched she becomes, the more she begins to wonder whether the new life she’s created for herself contains more pitfalls than prizes. Chock-full of vibrant historical details about London and Morocco in the 1960s, Green’s first foray into historical fiction does not disappoint. The novel shines brightest when Claire, who narrates, first arrives in London and again when she forms her initial impressions of Morocco. Green portrays the scenery and atmosphere so vividly that readers will be instantly transported. The descriptions of Marrakech, with its bright colors and beautiful architecture, present an especial sensory delight. While Claire seems to believe the story she tells is about Talitha, the narrative is really about an average girl’s brief brush with fame during an unprecedented time, tackling difficult questions of self-doubt, fulfillment, and individual purpose—complete with cameo appearances by Mick Jagger, John Lennon, and a host of others.
A provocative story about youth culture during the 1960s, overflowing with sex, drugs, and rock and roll.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-335-42578-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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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