This debut novel explores the ways traumas of the past can impact how we experience the present.
An interpreter living in Brooklyn throws herself into the lives of acquaintances to avoid confronting her own life.
The unnamed narrator, a woman from Albania, is married to Billy, an American professor of film. Billy asks his wife to focus on translation work while taking a break from interpreting, as interpreting seems to interfere with her ability to remain present. But she takes a job serving as an interpreter for Alfred, another Albanian immigrant, first for a dental visit and then for therapy to confront his demons from the war in Kosovo. The therapist fires her after the first session, for both identifying too closely with the client and getting lost in her own thoughts. From there, the narrator acts impulsively without considering the repercussions. She tries to help a struggling Kurdish woman desperate to evade a stalker and a former client who needs a new immigration attorney. All the while, she’s prone to reveries and what appear to be dissociative episodes that leave Billy stupefied. When they reach an impasse, he accepts a six-month artist’s residency in Hungary. The night before he departs, his wife follows strangers to a party where she gets high on mushrooms and falls asleep. As a wife and a protagonist, she proves wonderfully and frustratingly off-kilter. Eventually she flees New York to visit family in Albania. The novel heats up in the second half, when she returns to Brooklyn, where some of the consequences of her previous heroics materialize to thrilling effect. These suspenseful moments punctuate otherwise meandering tangents. While intriguing at times, the narration relies heavily on rhetorical questions and digressions loosely tied to the story by way of the protagonist’s saying that so and so or such and such “come to mind.” Some of the associations are more interesting than others. The author is at her best when she reveals her thematic concerns and her characters’ interiority, through their idiosyncrasies, interactions with one another, choices, gestures, and dialogue.
This debut novel explores the ways traumas of the past can impact how we experience the present.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781959030805
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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