A transformative tale of personal reinvention from a masterful storyteller.
In Huffman’s novel, a young man unwittingly endangers himself and his friends as they retrace a relative’s journey through Utah taken the previous century.
The novel explores two moments in a family’s history, taking place 112 years apart, both concluding in violence. Their convergence point is a young man named Tom Sullivan, who, in the early 1980s, works at a sporting goods store in Golden, Colorado, and hangs out with a salesman and Vietnam veteran named Jack Elmore, drinking in Jack’s garage. Jack has another friend he looks in on, the more opaque and laconic Frank, also a Vietnam vet. The men are paid a visit by Susan Kingsley, an acquisitions assistant specialist at the Smithsonian Museum, and by her ex-husband, Andrew Harrison, an unfaithful and ill-tempered junior FBI agent jealous that Susan’s career’s star might ascend before his. Susan’s on the trail of some letters that might shed light on how Mormons and Native Americans procured the rifles that were used in a massacre of over 100 emigrant travelers journeying through Mormon country in 1879. Those original letters have just been sent to their rightful heir: Tom. As Tom, Jack, and Frank head off on a fishing trip in which they also seek the homestead of William Mitchell, the writer of the letters, Susan follows in their wake, in search of history. And Andrew follows her, in search of revenge for the pall their divorce has cast over his job. In the retelling of William Mitchell’s covered wagon journey to Utah, frontier violence is a way of life; in the late 20th century, the violence is personal. The closing third of the novel ramps up the suspense in both timelines, conveyed in gorgeous prose and featuring rich character development. Both stories’ conclusions are emotionally affecting and unexpected. This irresistible novel manages the curious trick of making the reader want to stand up and cheer when a woman rides up on horseback in the middle of nowhere and says, “Afternoon, gentlemen. I’m Susan Kingsley with the Smithsonian Museum.”
A transformative tale of personal reinvention from a masterful storyteller.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9798988861300
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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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