A vivid and mature novel about old friends and second chances.
A tale of romance in which opposites attract, decades intervene, and emotions rekindle.
In 1957 at Fern High School in Provo, Utah, Elaine Bybee is a cheerleader for the school’s lackluster football team. Even as a teen, she’s independent-minded when it comes to romance: “Elaine would never go with just one person. Once you settle down, that’s it.” Even decades later in the story she says, “It’s silly believing there is only one person for you.” Readers soon meet Elaine’s fellow cheerleader Mona Lynn Moss and her too-perfect boyfriend, Phil Smith, as well as Andy Bond, a good-natured rancher’s son from the southern part of the state who plays trombone in the school’s band. “He had good teeth,” Elaine notices, when she first meets Andy. “They looked naturally straight, not the type lined up with braces.” Andy later describes himself as coming from a family of “congenital optimists,” and soon he and Elaine are spending time together and growing closer. But despite their growing intimacy, time and circumstance pull them apart; Andy later settles down on his ranch with a cowgirl wife, and Elaine moves to New York City, where she tries hard to shed her small-town ways (“Boy, had she ever changed,” notes the third-person narration at one point). Decades pass, and unlike many novelists, Redd handles the passage of large stretches of time with smooth confidence. Andy gets divorced, Elaine’s longtime relationship with a man named Michael Shaughnessy dwindles to nothing, and in a series of events that feel only slightly contrived, Redd brings her two soul mates back together again. Over the course of the novel, Redd’s narrative voice is often disarmingly evocative: “Didn’t wobble at all,” she describes a football in flight, “a fine thing to see, that pointed ball flowing through the night, shaped to fit in hands, or to be hugged to a chest.” She also effectively shows how her female characters make compromises over time, which is perhaps the novel’s strongest element.
A vivid and mature novel about old friends and second chances.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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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