A delightfully meta novel about a woman writing her way out of calamity.
A would-be biographer pursues two potential paydays in Upton’s comic novel.
Tabitha Acrete is 50, divorced, and in need of some cash. She’s a biographer by trade, and though her last effort—Annie: Her Life Story, about her deceased dog—was a flop, she has two prospective subjects whom she hopes will rejuvenate her career. One is Brent Vintner, an actor “so good looking they should bottle that man and spray him on belligerent people as a form of crowd control.” The other is Piper Fields, a renowned children’s book author whose career has taken a hit since the discovery that she writes erotic novels on the side. Both Brent and Piper happen to be in Tabitha’s hometown of Midlothian for the next several months, which should give Tabitha plenty of time to pry into the recesses of their private lives. The only problem is that Tabitha’s past celebrity profiles were so poorly received that she’s basically blacklisted—a fact that she misrepresents to her publisher. As Tabitha attempts, with mixed results, to worm her way into the lives of Brent and Piper, she also grapples with the legacy of her deceased ex-husband’s ashes, the colorful patrons of her nephew Leon’s bar (called The End of the World), an unwanted intern, and the fact that she might not be a very good biographer at all. Upton’s prose is razor-sharp—as filtered through the unpredictable and slightly delusional perspective of Tabitha, it takes on a magical, frenetic quality. Here, Tabitha tries to justify why a biographer isn’t really a writer: “As a biographer I’m ferreting out truth, outlining a life until the contours are visible. It never feels like writing to me. I’m not inventing anything. I’m releasing a life, clarifying a life. I’m more like a painter or a photographer than a writer. I hardly even work in—in—words.” Though many madcap events occur, it’s Tabitha’s humorous and hypnotic voice that propels the story.
A delightfully meta novel about a woman writing her way out of calamity.Pub Date: May 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781952386893
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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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