Strong, stinging social observation that doesn’t entirely work as fiction.
A woman with a long history of temporary employment finds her latest gig as a driver of a new, supposedly driverless vehicle.
“This could be a good job,” Teresa thinks aboard the shuttle bus taking her and 50 fellow trainees from Boston’s South Station to the gleaming suburban headquarters of AllOver, an “experience company” that claims to “shape the digital economy to fit neighborhood-centric needs.” She’s had plenty of jobs to compare it with; McNeil’s debut novel opens with Teresa swimming laps at a local Y while she recalls the many jobs she’s had and lost for one reason or another over several decades. At 48, living at home with her mother because she can’t afford her own place, all she hopes for is a decent paycheck. She is bemused but doesn’t really care that she will be hidden inside a “working prototype” that AllOver is promoting and putting on the road as an actual self-driving car. This seems like a possible setup for a thriller exposing a sinister corporation with some evil plan, but the insufferably woke AllOver never appears to be more than just another profit-centered business pretending to care about customers and employees. McNeil, author of a well-regarded critical history of the Internet (Lurking: How a Person Became a User, 2020), focuses here on America’s disorienting transition from an industrial to a service economy and its consequences for working people. Teresa is her case study, and the major flaw in this sharply observed, extremely well-written novel is that we are more than halfway through it before readers learn why this obviously intelligent woman is so passive and has such minimal expectations. When we do, it supplements McNeil’s powerful portrait of an unequal economy with a biting example of class privilege as an instrument of upward employment mobility. Unfortunately, the novel has been permeated for so long with Teresa’s alienated, apathetic personality that it never develops narrative momentum, and a dramatic final event leads to a painfully ironic last line rather than closure.
Strong, stinging social observation that doesn’t entirely work as fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780374610661
Page Count: 288
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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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