A sophisticated and discerning family portrait.
An affluent Brooklyn family navigates family drama, career trouble, and long-kept secrets in Karpa’s novel.
Roger White is a film professor at New York University, but his first and only screenwriting success is far behind him. He’s going through the motions at work and longs for a good idea to revive the creative side of his career. His second wife, Casey, was raised in rural Missouri and is now comfortably set up in their Brooklyn home, due to the generosity of Roger’s mother Sherbeam, a celebrated Manhattan artist whose star is beginning to fade. Their kids, Demmy and Abby, attend an exclusive school, but Casey has some insecurities about the fact that she doesn’t live in Park Slope like “all the other mothers” who “walked (or hired someone to walk) their progeny to school.” She’s driving a Porsche, but her own Spanish translation service is foundering; she’s also still haunted by the loss of her first husband and daughter, who tragically drowned in the Mississippi. Meanwhile, Demmy is busy with applications to Ivy League schools while still trying to reject her own privilege, and the egotistical Sherbeam is planning a celebratory retrospective of her work in Barcelona. Egos collide and tensions flare, though, when Sherbeam’s new paintings are revealed, and Casey makes a discovery that will send the entire family into uncharted terrain. Karpa’s fictional White family seems at first glance to live and thrive in an increasingly frivolous locale. Several stand to inherit large sums, and trust funds and luxury cars are the norm. However, the complex novel takes off in several unexpected directions, diving into Casey’s Southern roots and Sherbeam’s emotionally abusive behavior. As a result, the narrative becomes absorbing, and it’s well-informed about contemporary fads and mores while staying expertly focused on the characters’ hopes and losses. Overall, it’s a deeply satisfying story that’s written with intelligence and wit, and—like the on-the-go White family—never stays in one place too long.
A sophisticated and discerning family portrait.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2022
ISBN: 9781736244456
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Mumblers Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
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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