A delightful, richly detailed set of stories.
Cody spins linked tales of mountain-town life in this collection.
It’s 1999, and in the small Appalachian town of Runion, North Carolina, the old and the new brush up against each other in uncomfortable ways. In “The Wine of Astonishment,” a minister sets out on a winter night to deliver some news to the estranged sister of one of his parishioners. On his way up the mountain, however, he picks up a hitchhiker, who, at the point of the knife, redirects the course of the minister’s evening. In “Overwinter,” a college professor gets snowed in at home on the same day his wife was planning to leave him for a new man. He can’t deal directly with his collapsing marriage, however, because he must try to find a way to keep the senile woman next door alive when the power goes off. A girl and her great-grandmother sit on their porch in “Conversion,” watching men turn the old church next door into a mosque; it isn’t long before some locals in pickup trucks come to start trouble with the new neighbors, and the woman and girl are eyewitnesses. In these 12 tales, which span the 12 months of the year, Cody documents the cycle of death and life in a colorful American town. The author’s prose is precise and frequently surprising, alternating between moments of peril and humor. “When Dr. Brian Anderson used up his last breath on a moderately difficult ascending passage in Gaubert’s Nocturne and Allegro Scherzando and fell over dead…the Department of Music at Runion State University—for the first time in forty-one years—faced the task of finding a new Professor of Flute.” The stories all sing on their own, but it is in the harmonizing of characters and events as they appear in multiple tales that the real joy of the collection is found. From intimate moments of personal crisis to communitywide occasions, such as those found in the rambling “Decoration Day,” Cody effectively captures conflicts of American life at the turn of the last millennium.
A delightful, richly detailed set of stories.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-942-01-666-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Pisgah Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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