A wild, inventive plot can’t hide the novel’s weak writing and lack of emotional center.
The debut novel from poet Lozada-Oliva shows five women’s lives undone by a strange curse.
In Boston on Christmas Eve, 83-year-old Guatemalan immigrant Candelaria chats with her daughter on the phone and moments later inexplicably knifes her own loving boyfriend in the gut. The killing seems to trigger an earthquake—or an imagined cataclysm only Candelaria can see—just before the novel flashes back to a year prior to explain the murder. Candelaria’s daughter Lucia has three daughters, Candy, Bianca, and Paola, estranged from one another and recovering from addiction, betrayal, and violence, respectively. Dark stories emerge from the family’s history, including a relative who died mysteriously in the Candelaria Caves of Guatemala. With these pulp fiction elements in place, Lozada-Oliva then delivers a gleeful but clunky schlock-fest, complete with zombies, cannibalism, body-snatcher sex, and a fertility cult with an underground lair. As an idea it should amount to raucous fun, but somehow even with all this crammed in the novel still feels padded with needless scenes to reach 300 pages. As her granddaughters reunite under dire circumstances and Candelaria guns her way through post-earthquake Boston toward an Old Country Buffet, past and present merge for a blood-soaked finale, as male characters are eaten, stabbed, hung, and one later turns into a TV. In its best moments, the book leans toward Everything Everywhere All at Once territory, but the novel has very little heart and too much of the writing feels dashed off: “The world is finite, but women are forever,” “Bianca approached the TV like it was a giant horse,” and “Life is a lifelong journey.”
A wild, inventive plot can’t hide the novel’s weak writing and lack of emotional center.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781662601804
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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