An intriguing but uneven tale about a boisterous gang of shipmates.
A nostalgic debut novel chronicles the alcohol-fueled hijinks of a Navy man in his early 20s.
Bittick’s tale is a look back at a moment in a man’s life when he is “too old to be a kid and too young to be considered an adult.” The author’s narrator, Bosner, is a 21-year-old aviation maintenance worker in the Navy stationed far from home. His life boils down to working long hours fixing helicopters in the hangar, trying to make it to a local bar before last call, and then collapsing in the barracks before waking up and repeating the cycle. The best part of Bosner’s life—besides his beat-up jalopy, the Green Beater—is the camaraderie he shares with his gang of shipmates. When two of his friends, B-man and Dolvar, decide to move into a house with another shipmate and his wife, Bosner wonders whether two “consummate partiers” will be good roommates for a married couple. But he dismisses his concerns because of what the house will provide for the gang: a place to party away from the barracks. Bosner then describes three weekends of epic parties at the Cape Henry House, featuring falls on black ice, drunken sprints through neighbors’ yards, fights, beer pong, romance, and karaoke. After the gang discovers that some of its members will soon be sent abroad to support a ship’s deployment (and the married couple tell the hard-partying roommates to move out), the group throws one final Super Bowl Sunday blowout to bid the house farewell. Bittick clearly understands the nuances of Navy life, and his descriptions of barracks living and work in the hangars are vivid and captivating. Unfortunately, the tale focuses on the gang’s bashes at the Cape Henry House. Drunken fights and keg stands are neither interesting nor funny when the characters involved are as thinly drawn as the members of Bosner’s gang, who are basically interchangeable. The most fully developed players besides Bosner wisely do not spend much time at the Cape Henry House parties. The story suggests that it’s more fun to attend bashes than read about them.
An intriguing but uneven tale about a boisterous gang of shipmates.Pub Date: April 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73703-090-4
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2022
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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