A slightly uneven but often sweet coming-of-age tale.
A woman babysits her niece and learns some important lessons in Tirado-Ryen’s novel.
It’s 2005 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and 26-year-old Kim Kincaid has been tasked with babysitting her 6-year-old niece, Summer, while Kim’s older sister, Dena Nordstrom, is on vacation with her husband at a ski resort for two weeks. Kim is ill-equipped to take care of a child—pretty much the only sustenance in her house at the moment is leftover Chinese takeout and vodka—but she resents the fact that her sister thinks she’d be bad at it. The novel jumps around a bit, presenting flashbacks of Kim’s relationships with her family members, but most of the story follows Kim as she adjusts to taking care of a young child. She struggles at first, but she and Summer do eventually bond, and Kim learns that she can be a responsible adult when she tries. Readers also meet her best friend, Jillian Martin, who has a big personality; she’s having an affair with her married boss. Kim’s also starting to have doubts about Jared McKenzie, her boyfriend of two years, who comes off as a jerk; he’s so awful, in fact, that readers may find it hard to muster much sympathy as Kim decides whether to break up with him. This is a layered story, with complicated relationships between Kim and her late mother, between Kim and Dena, and between Kim and her friends and boyfriend; the siblings’ parents consider Dena to be the family’s golden child, and Kim struggles to get out of her shadow, which increases her insecurity in other areas of her life. Some flashbacks feel a bit unnecessary, revealing little that readers can’t gather from the main storyline; for example, in 2005, Kim has an encounter with a woman who bullied her in high school, and readers can easily infer how mean that woman is, but the author includes a flashback of her bullying Kim in the past, anyway. Overall, though, this is a pleasing story of a young woman deciding what she wants.
A slightly uneven but often sweet coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: July 10, 2023
ISBN: 9798218334741
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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