An absorbing and deeply nuanced romance.
A love story unfolds during a turbulent time in Puerto Rican history in this debut historical novel.
In 1928, 14-year-old Marco Rios loses his father and grandmother when a hurricane devastates the town of Yabucoa, Puerto Rico. Left to care for his mother and younger sister, Julia, and experiencing the poverty left in the hurricane’s wake, Marco vows to “dedicate his life to improving the circumstances of his people.” Seven years later, he is a business student at the University of Puerto Rico when he meets Isabela, the socialite daughter of Don Gabriel Soto, one of the wealthiest men on the island. Despite her father’s misgivings, Isabela finds the earnest and ambitious Marco charming. After their marriage in 1937, Marco enjoys a thriving career with the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Agency while Isabela begins teaching adults to read and write in the poverty-stricken El Fanguito slum. When Isabela becomes pregnant, Marco forms a construction company called Solemar Enterprises with his friend Sammy.As their family grows, Marco’s and Isabela’s political allegiances create a divide within the marriage. Marco supports working with the Americans to secure the island’s future, while Isabela backs Puerto Rican nationalism. She starts a magazine called Letras Boricuas to promote Puerto Rican art and culture, “highlighting the island’s history and varied heritage.” Isabela also grows close to journalist Antonio Badilla, a staunch nationalist. When her loyalties lead to her involvement in a shocking act of political violence, Marco and Isabela are left to wonder if their marriage will survive. Barresi is a naturally gifted storyteller with a talent for narrative structure. The chapters alternate between Marco’s and Isabela’s perspectives, giving readers both sides of their story. The couple’s relationship unfolds at a steady but unhurried pace, which allows their inner lives and shifting political sympathies to evolve in a realistic manner. The wealth of historical details bolsters the novel. The author references major political figures of the time—including Marco’s preferred gubernatorial candidate, Luis Muñoz Marín, and nationalist firebrand Pedro Albizu Campos—throughout the story. What emerges is a fully three-dimensional portrait of a couple trying to find a way forward in a time of political and social upheaval.
An absorbing and deeply nuanced romance.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1639889303
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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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