A Buddhist seeker’s painful journey—occasionally irritating, ultimately illuminating.
In Brandt’s novel, a depressed young woman journeys from New York City to the Himalayas to find herself.
In June 1986, 27-year-old Ellie Adkins lives alone in a four-room apartment in Spanish Harlem and works in a boring, entry-level job at a small nonprofit downtown. Her boyfriend, Seth Federman, has abruptly moved to California to work on Jerry Brown’s gubernatorial campaign, and her best friend Cass is away for the summer. Introverted and lonely, she slides deeper and deeper into apathy and passivity. Searching for the secret to happiness and the truth about love, she rejects an intrusive co-worker’s suggestions of Prozac and therapy and seeks answers in books on magic and spirituality. A flyer in a bookstore leads her to weekly lectures on Buddhism by the charismatic Calvin Ross at a 14th Street loft. Soon she’s entangled in a clandestine relationship with Calvin, a much older man with a long white beard, a slight paunch, and narcissistic tendencies. Cass returns in the fall, with a new punk look and an infatuation with a man who wants to lead an expedition to the summit of Mount Everest. When Ellie travels to Nepal with Cass’ mountain-climbing group, much of what she thought she knew is upended, and she is forced to accept new truths. The author’s spare, direct writing style and pithy descriptions of people and places vividly portray late-1980s New York City. Though intelligent, articulate, and beautiful, Ellie seems unable to say no or to express her true feelings, continually accepting dismissive and demeaning treatment from those around her. Her frustrating lack of agency—an authentic portrayal of depressive thinking—makes her hard to warm up to at first, but her keen perception and frank self-awareness (“When I wake now, there is maybe a nanosecond of me being who I used to be, then I think of Calvin, and become who I am now: a harpy, swooping down to take bites out of myself”) draw the reader in.
A Buddhist seeker’s painful journey—occasionally irritating, ultimately illuminating.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9786185728021
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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