An entertaining, reflective novel with layered characters.
In Duberstein’s novel, a retired man’s encounter with a terminally ill young woman shakes up his boring life.
Ian Nelson, a straight-laced, 66-year-old retired guidance counselor, lives an uneventful life in a small New England town with his dog, Fred, and his disapproving wife, Polly, a psychotherapist. Besides visiting his curmudgeonly friend Jack Sutcliffe and occasional phone calls with his grown-and-flown son and daughter, Ian’s chief social activity is singing with the Angel Band, a local chorus that serenades people who are receiving hospice care. One December evening, they sing for an unusual client—a beautiful, young, and lonely woman named Anita whose vibrancy belies her diagnosis of an aggressive, fatal brain tumor. As Anita draws him into an ambiguous friendship, Ian soon finds himself breaking the group’s rules against involvement with clients and keeping secrets from Polly—despite his conviction that after nearly 40 years of marriage, she can read his mind. When his life is suddenly upended, Ian confronts and questions everything he has taken for granted about life, love, and mortality. Duberstein’s prose, evocative without being flowery, abounds with spot-on psychological insights and wry social commentary, whether describing the dynamics of small-town gossip or the frustrations of booking travel online. The novel begins slowly, highlighting the tedium of Ian’s day-to-day existence, but the pace soon accelerates. Ian is initially a typical nice-guy hero in the well-trodden territory of the midlife-crisis novel, but he morphs into someone much more interesting. The novel explores themes like honesty and secrecy in relationships, how well we can really know others, aging, death, and happiness with a light touch that makes such timeless questions relevant and relatable.
An entertaining, reflective novel with layered characters.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-57869-085-5
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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
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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