A surprising and enjoyable novel about camaraderie and letting go.
A sick woman asks her friends to help her die in Wasyliszyn’s debut novel.
Opal Slepecki has pancreatic cancer. Though she is not yet 55, Opal’s pancreas is “gold-star jacked up,” as she phrases it to her three best friends when they come over for drinks and macaroons in her gazebo. Having already exhausted all of her treatment options, Opal has decided the only course left for her is euthanasia—a serious crime in Minnesota—and she needs her friends’ help to do the deed. Her friends are understandably horrified, both by the revelation of her prognosis and by the requests Opal has written on cards and given to them. Luna, the beautiful, cake-baking neck model, has been tasked with collecting brown recluse spiders. Urse, the brash friend with a traumatic childhood and a burgeoning Adderall dependency, must find poison mushrooms. The loyal, possibly depressed Ruby is responsible for the most dramatic ingredient of all: heroin. The friends are worried that Opal has broken with reality—she seems unable to grasp the fact that her husband, Oliver, died six months ago—but they are willing to do whatever they can to help. (Well, almost anything.) As the pals begin their morbid scavenger hunt, a lifetime’s worth of traumas, hang-ups, missed opportunities, and unfulfilled dreams come bubbling to the surface. Shot through with penetrating insights on aging and loss, the novel is ultimately about friendships, particularly long ones. Wasyliszyn wrings plenty of humor out of her wonderfully human characters, particularly the ailing Opal: “Opal woke to the smell of flowers. I must be at my own funeral.” (When she realizes she is merely in a hospital bed, her visiting friends presenting her with a vase of lilacs, she shuts her eyes again, lamenting, “Aw, man, a hospital. The opposite of my funeral.”) In Opal’s case, the end of life is equal parts heist machinations and wry retrospective, with little time for treacly sentimentality.
A surprising and enjoyable novel about camaraderie and letting go.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2024
ISBN: 9798990911000
Page Count: 315
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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