A bold reengagement with the novel’s time-tested staple subject: romantic love.
A 20-something Brooklynite remakes the form and function of love in this story told in rhyming couplets.
The speaker of this novel in verse is, at first, enviably settled in her life. She enjoys her job teaching composition; she loves her boyfriend; she feels “if not exactly pride, at least the pretty, / riskless pleasure of conformity.” Then she meets an electrifying woman who sweeps her into a tumultuous, explosively erotic relationship. Through a series of discrete stanzas, themselves portioned into rhyming couplets, the speaker narrates the dissolution of her relationship with her boyfriend and the charged early months of her new love affair, which vivifies all the quotidian objects of her life even as it plunges her into sincere mourning for all that was lost in the breakup with the man she “revered / but felt [she] had been failing many years.” The author’s formal choices underscore the thematic obsessions of the book. The rhyming couplets create conversations within themselves, each line echoing the other’s language in sonic duets reminiscent of the ways couples reflect each other’s identities. The conceit is clever, and the verse itself is full of startling, effervescent imagery—not to mention full-throated eroticism—that is a pleasure to read. However, the only fully realized character in this tightly controlled exploration of identity and desire is the speaker herself. Perhaps this is the result of the form, which reflects the boyfriend and the lover as elements of the speaker’s own voice; perhaps it is a more deliberate flattening, illustrating the speaker’s statement that “love / has been, above all things, the engine of / self-knowledge in my life.” Regardless, the relentless interiority restricts the reader’s engagement to only those things that illustrate the speaker’s blooming selfhood. All other characters become symbols of the speaker’s progress through her journey of self-realization rather than people in their own rights. Which leaves the reader to ask how much more real or nuanced our narrator could have seemed if the characters that accompany her transformation were afforded the same ability to look into their own mirrors.
A bold reengagement with the novel’s time-tested staple subject: romantic love.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780374607951
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
