Character-driven speculative fiction with strong worldbuilding and fine writing.
Three queer sisters, one dead father, and a fraught inheritance in a flooded city at the end of the world.
“People think it’s just hellfire and brimstone, four horseman and out, but actually the end times go on and on and on,” remarks Irene Carmichael with regard to the Book of Revelation, and Armfield’s third novel seems to have taken a leaf from it, though she and her quarrelsome sisters also have a foot in King Lear. Isla, Irene, and their half sister, Agnes, are the daughters of famous, and famously nasty, architect Stephen Carmichael, known for daring structures custom-built for the partially underwater environment. As the novel opens, he has died, and the estranged sisters have reluctantly gathered to figure out how they can get to the hospital to view his body. With most modes of transport washed out, unreliable ferries that depart from randomly placed jetties are the main way to get around. While the three women have difficult personalities on their own, their father exacerbated their troubles both during his life and after his death with disbursements and bequeathals structured to pit them against each other. Meanwhile, Isla, a therapist, continues to see patients, though her wife has left her to explore communities outside the city. Irene has lost heart for her advanced studies in Christian theology, but her partner, Jude, keeps an even keel, cooking pasta dinners and “focusing solely on what’s going on right in front of them, as if everything else is irrelevant and incapable of causing them harm.” Agnes, a cranky barista, makes cappuccinos and writes the wrong names on them on purpose. Armfield garnered lots of love from literary horror fans with her debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea (2022): These readers will surely relish her impressive post-climate-catastrophe vision (horror tropes included). For some readers, however, the unhappy sisters and their ruined planet will be oppressive. When at one point a peripheral character develops a penchant for “miserabilist literature,” one thinks of recommending the very book he appears in.
Character-driven speculative fiction with strong worldbuilding and fine writing.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781250344311
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
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
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