A thrilling, memorable tale of struggle, style, and organized crime.
A young fashion industry hopeful learns hard lessons in life and business in Thompson’s novel.
The author parlays her decades of experience in New York City’s fashion industry into this crafty, provocative novel. In 1979, Cathy Callahan, a pretty Fashion Institute of Technology grad, diligently works at Starlight, a moderately priced eveningwear fashion house, but she dreams about launching her own line. Her roommates, Heather and Julie, also have high hopes for careers in the field, but all three are simultaneously disillusioned and terrified when they learn of the stranglehold organized crime families have on the fashion industry at large. After Starlight’s owner is murdered, the business closes, and Cathy moves on to work at another house, an opportunity that ends disastrously with a sexual harassment ordeal. A summer share in the Hamptons seems like the perfect respite, as Cathy falls for dashing, wealthy Wall Street investment banker Matt Sullivan, who’s more than prepared to financially and emotionally support her entrepreneurial aspirations. When her new eveningwear line is featured in Women’s Wear Daily, a firestorm of attention ensues as increasingly brazen Mafia hits occur around Manhattan. When the racketeers sniff out the amount of revenue her line is generating, they begin to infiltrate Cathy’s business operations, but she’s become both street-smart and business-savvy enough to outsmart them. Or has she? With vivid details, swift plotting, and crisp dialogue, Thompson writes with knowledgeable authority, effectively capturing the flare, flash, and wild decadence of the glittery era of the early 1980s, name-checking all of the iconic designers who made waves on the runways and on the Studio 54 dance floor. Beneath the melodrama and cutthroat antics (“A large meat hook hung by a one-inch-thick wire bolted to the ceiling. In the corner of one wall hung an array of torture tools”), the novel also makes statements about women in business and their enduring struggle to be seen, heard, and taken seriously. The sweet happy ending will please romance fans, but the cautionary themes simmering at the novel’s core give it credibility and grit.
A thrilling, memorable tale of struggle, style, and organized crime.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Winthrop House
Review Posted Online: April 27, 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
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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