A debut novel of the ’60s that becomes more engaging as the pages turn.
Madden’s novel celebrates the Ohio River Valley in the 1960s and follows the intersecting lives of two young locals as they grow into adulthood.
Steubenville and Mingo Junction, Ohio, are towns dominated by Wheeling Steel. Jack Clark is the oldest child in a large, loving Irish Catholic family; his father, Tom, tried to escape Steubenville, but fate brought him back home and he took a job in the steel mill. Laurie Carmine’s Italian family is more well-to-do; her father took advantage of the G.I. Bill and became a doctor. The Clarks live right on the river; the Carmines live well away from it. However, Jack and Carmine meet in seventh grade in parochial school; shy Jack is smitten with Laurie right off the bat. The narrative tells their stories, but especially Jack’s: his school friends and his doubts, his striving in high school sports (a very big deal), and his dreams for the future. A keen sense of time and place is present, featuring such elements as the songs that the teens danced to; Jack’s first car, a Plymouth Valiant; the Vietnam War; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963; and the 1968 spring that claimed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and any innocence America had left. Do Jack and Laurie finally triumph as their love grows and deepens? To Madden’s credit, he keeps readers guessing in that regard; Jack goes missing in action in Vietnam, Laurie marries someone else, and that’s just for starters. A disclaimer tries to separate history from fiction, but it also notes that Jack’s life shares strong similarities with Madden’s. The book gets off to an awkwardly expository start with a scene of Laurie’s father laying out the whole Carmine family history at their Thanksgiving dinner. Soon, however, the story takes over and gingerly coexists with bits of local lore that the author seems proud to include, along with uncredited black-and-white photographs of various locations mentioned in the book, as well as footnotes.
A debut novel of the ’60s that becomes more engaging as the pages turn.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2023
ISBN: 9798987066812
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Potomac Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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