Riveting family saga with themes of female empowerment creatively tied to tarot lore.
In parallel narratives spanning a century, a woman and her great-grandmother grapple with generational trauma through their interpretations of a tarot deck.
The narrative begins with a traumatic scene of sexual assault. The survivor is Wanda Justice, a 17-year-old girl raised by her single mother in small-town Alberta, Canada. She burns down the abandoned church where the rape took place, enacting the novel’s title for the first of many times. Cut to 1916 in Scotland, where another sexual assault occurs, this time of Sheena Firth. As a result of the assault, Sheena becomes pregnant with Sadie, Wanda’s great-grandmother. Jumping forward to 1999, Wanda struggles with the aftermath of her own assault. The novel also charts Sadie’s travels as she makes her way from the farm where her mother was raised in Scotland to her present-day home in Canada. Both Wanda and Sadie are comforted by the introduction of tarot into their lives. Using their intuitive powers, they’re able to self-reflect on their decisions and prepare for coming difficulties. For example, the cards alert each of them to future problems with the men in their lives. The novel is entrenched in tarot lore; the 22 chapters correspond to the cards of the major arcana, the named cards in a standard tarot deck (the Empress, the Fool, etc.). Representing the trauma and resilience passed down from Sheena to each of her descendants, the women pass a tarot deck from mother to daughter. Coulter provides each character with a distinct voice, preventing confusion despite shifting chronology. Although the linking of Sheena’s trauma to that of her descendants is occasionally heavy-handed, as when Sadie says that Sheena’s “trauma belongs to all of us,” still the theme of women empowering women makes for a timely, poignant novel with shades of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing (2018) and Miriam Toews’ Women Talking (2018).
Riveting family saga with themes of female empowerment creatively tied to tarot lore.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781039166943
Page Count: 299
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2023
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
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
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