A lyrical meditation on power, need, and love.
Two women are roiled by loss and desire.
Smith returns to Rome, the setting of her novel The Everlasting (2020), to render, in luminous prose, the lives of two unnamed women, a century apart, grieving, angry, and defiant. Each is engaged in botanical data collection: One, in 1854, assists British botanist Richard Deakin, who aims to record every species of plant growing in the Colosseum. Her father, outraged because she fell in love with a woman, indentured her to Deakin as punishment. In 2018, another woman combs the Colosseum: a graduate student from Mississippi working for a demeaning academic adviser, assigned to compare Deakin’s catalog with flora of the present day. Both women are haunted by loss: one, of her lover, who married; the other, of her mother, an amateur naturalist, who died when she was 15. Her mother taught her that plants “meant something. Not just in the doctrine-of-signatures way, or the yellow-rose-for-friendship way,” but in a deeply spiritual way. The only proof of beauty, her mother believed, “was a piece of living green pushing through a coffin of spring soil.” Smith makes deft use of Deakin’s Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, published in 1855, which combined meticulous botanical descriptions with information on each plant’s medicinal, culinary, and even literary significance. The women collectors are acutely sensitive to shape, texture, and odor and alert, as well, to plants’ cultural connotations and metaphorical richness: “Some plants, like lovers, are parasitical,” one collector reflects. “Naming carries bias, or bias worms its way to names.” The contemporary collector is enraged by the effects of climate change and rampant tourism on the ecology of the Colosseum. Both women rail against the arrogance and sexism that circumscribe their lives: “What does it take,” they ask, “to survive in this world, as a woman, as a weed?” The book is illustrated with delicate drawings by Schermer-Gramm.
A lyrical meditation on power, need, and love.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-60547-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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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