Full of grit and atmosphere, suspense and feeling—a powerful and promising debut.
In a small town on the Maine coast, life is anything but easy.
Released from jail after serving 20 years for killing a man, Blake Renato returns to the area she once fled to try to start over. The house and land her grandparents bequeathed her are in such desperate condition that she rents a nearby garage apartment from a diner waitress named Nora Hayes. After being hit hard by her husband's death and her daughter's departure for medical school, Nora has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and now her pain and weakness have begun to interfere with her ability to work or get around at all. Blake, a towering woman with a silent, forbidding mien and long black hair, doesn't plan to get involved with her landlady, but Nora's sweetness and her disability draw her in and the two bond as they work together in Nora's beloved garden. Blake gets a job as sternman for Leland Savard, a struggling young lobsterman who's raising his third-grade daughter, Quinn, on his own, further hamstrung by blood feuds that reach back generations and a lifelong hopeless crush on Nora's daughter. Perry limns the fragile connections among these hardbitten characters with care and patience that mirror the attention they pour into their flower and vegetable gardens, yearning toward the sun, and the reader comes to deeply care for them. Each of them has already endured so much—Blake's whole personality is shaped by abuse and loss—but by keeping the past under wraps, they give it power to wound them anew. Nine-year-old Quinn is their saving grace, collecting her "swear tax" on their constant cursing and telling the truth when no one else will, but the way forward is almost lost altogether before the buds of redemption can unfurl.
Full of grit and atmosphere, suspense and feeling—a powerful and promising debut.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781953002419
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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
Haig’s positive message will keep his fans happy.
A British widow travels to Ibiza and learns that it’s never too late to have a happy life.
In a world that seems to be getting more unstable by the moment, Haig’s novels are a steady ship in rough seas, offering a much-needed positive message. In works like the bestselling The Midnight Library (2020), he reminds us that finding out what you truly love and where you belong in the universe are the foundations of building a better existence. His latest book continues this upbeat messaging, albeit in a somewhat repetitive and facile way. Retired British schoolteacher Grace Winters discovers that an old acquaintance has died and left her a ramshackle home in Ibiza. A widow who lost her only child years earlier, Grace is at first reluctant to visit the house, because, at 72, she more or less believes her chance for happiness is over—but when she rouses herself to travel to the island, she discovers the opposite is true. A mystery surrounds her friend’s death involving a roguish islander, his activist daughter, an internationally famous DJ, and a strange glow in the sea that acts as a powerful life force and upends Grace’s ideas of how the cosmos works. Framed as a response to a former student’s email, the narrative follows Grace’s journey from skeptic (she was a math teacher, after all) to believer in the possibility of magic as she learns to move on from the past. Her transformation is the book’s main conflict, aside from a protest against an evil developer intent on destroying Ibiza’s natural beauty. The outcome is never in doubt, and though the story often feels stretched to the limit—this novel could have easily been a novella—the author’s insistence on the power of connection to change lives comes through loud and clear.
Haig’s positive message will keep his fans happy.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593489277
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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