An engrossing story of a kid deciphering the fine line between right and wrong.
A teenager intent on becoming a Catholic priest is rocked by family secrets in Nemeth’s knotty coming-of-age novel.
It’s the summer of 1965, and 14-year-old Eddie Kovacs has his heart set on attending a Catholic seminary in the fall to study for the priesthood, cheered on by the priests and nuns of St. Catherine’s parish in Appleton, Wisconsin. But his family is too tied up in their own problems to help advance his ambition. His father, Frank, a domineering, cash-strapped union official at a paper mill, would rather he go to a public high school than a pricey seminary; his mother, Gail, is a beaten-down alcoholic who has to beg Frank for shopping money; and his brother, Danny, worries that the draft will derail his dream of playing professional baseball. Eddie begins a chaste romance with Marcy, a bohemian classmate who plies him with books like Crime and Punishment. The two begin spying on and photographing people, uncovering hidden scandals: Father MacMillan may be a pedophile; Father Bauer and Sister Mary Alice are conducting an illicit affair; and Frank, who is also the parish bookkeeper, is skimming the Sunday collection. All of this violates Catholic ethics, but so does Eddie’s scheme to use blackmail to save Danny from the draft, keep Frank out of jail, and obtain his seminary tuition. Nemeth’s yarn vividly portrays a family under pressure, their quarrels and picking sharpened by a grinding lack of money (“We have priorities, Eddie,” sighs Gail; “Your priority is gin,” he retorts). Eddie is a complex anti-hero: not as holy as he thinks, but capable of deep feeling, rendered in lyrical prose (“Sometimes I cried because I’d never see my grandmother again, and sometimes I laughed when I remembered her antics…She loved to dance and she loved to flirt. I had watched her do both at the wedding of the girl who grew up across the street”). Readers will root for his crooked search for a compromised goodness.
An engrossing story of a kid deciphering the fine line between right and wrong.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 335
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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