A distinctive, fragmentary story of an artist’s painful coming of age.
A troubled screenwriter reflects on his origins in Gaiter’s literary novel.
Louisiana-born, Harvard-educated Jessie Vincent Grandier III comes to Los Angeles to break into screenwriting. It’s something of an adjustment; Jessie has been raised mostly among the white people on his Black father’s military bases and the upper-class, light-skinned Blacks of his Creole mother’s New Orleans family. Staying with relatives in South LA, he’s exposed to an entirely new Black community—and the culture shock is profound. Just as discombobulating is the realization that Hollywood is not filled with the semioticians of his Ivy League film classes but with businessmen who place little value on art or imagination. When he loses his job as a script reader at a television network, Jessie begins a slide into alcoholism and bitterness. As he does, his memory travels to his childhood as a military brat, the lone boy in a family of five; his failures to live up to his violent father’s standards of masculinity; his attempts, in high school and college, to excel beyond other people’s racist expectations; his relationship with his now-deceased mother, Lulene; his love of music; and the complex emotions he has regarding his own identity as a gay man. Is it too late to become the person Jessie has always wanted to be? Perhaps he is destined to become as embittered and uptight as the man he’s never wanted to emulate: his father. Gaiter’s lively prose presses against the confines of every sentence: “In case you hadn’t noticed,” he addresses the reader midway through, “somewhere along the line, between the vicious, whip-wielding nuns, and Grandier’s military fist, Jessie had developed an aversion to authority, being told what to do, and having others’ assumptions thrust upon him.” The book’s real pleasure is in this dynamic voice rather than the plot, which doesn’t develop so much as accumulate through a series of flashbacks. The text includes occasional news articles, poems, and photographs; together, these shards memorably tell the story of a man attempting to assemble the ill-fitting pieces of a life.
A distinctive, fragmentary story of an artist’s painful coming of age.Pub Date: June 24, 2024
ISBN: 9798990289901
Page Count: 337
Publisher: Legba Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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