An unorthodox but compelling cry against racist violence.
A stylistically thorny novel about a lynching that encompasses prose-poem, satire, ghost story, and other rhetorical somersaults.
The heart of the sixth novel by experimentalist McIlvoy—author of 57 Octaves Below Middle C (2017, etc.)—is a murder: Lincoln, a Black man, is found hanging from a swing set in the predominantly White burg of Cord, North Carolina, aka Crackertown. Investigators are summoned, locals are questioned, and Lincoln’s mother mourns. But little here follows the arc of a procedural. McIlvoy’s fury at racial violence stoked by “Trumpspawn” is clear: Lincoln is lynched on the day of Trump’s election, for starters, and the bigoted authorities are quick to dismiss the murder as a suicide. But the novel’s approach to the killing is oblique. What to make, for instance, of Mr. Panther, one of the investigators, who becomes a habitué of the town while carrying machetes on his person? Or that he falls for the fiddle-playing daughter of a prominent local who died years before and has been reincarnated as a mockingbird? Call it the triumph of free imagination over ignorance and hate: Acker, a character plainly inspired by the late experimental artist and writer Kathy Acker, is the novel’s guiding spirit of art, inclusion, and freedom. As the novel progresses, more characters become (or are revealed to be) “Presences,” ghosts who serve to remind others of the town's racist past and present that the locals prefer to keep unspoken. Throughout the story, McIlvoy pivots from lyrical riffs (“the bloodrust airtaste of the doused, excited, heavy rope”), dark-humored passages about Second Amendment hard-liners, and abstruse plotting. It’s a perpetually disorienting book, but McIlvoy’s approach does establish a certain properly righteous mood: In a town thick with injustice, placid prose and straightforward plotting simply won’t do.
An unorthodox but compelling cry against racist violence.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73298-203-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: WTAW Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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