An inventive novel about wishes and regret.
A woman turns to dreams to relive her life differently in Woodsey’s speculative novel.
Tildy Sullivan is the middle daughter of a wealthy New York family in decline. Her father, the third-generation scion of a cosmetics empire, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Her two sisters are shallow and oblivious sponges. Her data scientist mother is dead, having left Tildy an AI assistant named Russell and her stock in the family company. Tildy has followed in her mother’s footsteps—she, too, works in data science, and she lives in the dead woman’s apartment. Tildy is single and still pining over Aidan, the man she loved and lost eight years prior during a sojourn in the family’s ancestral home of Ireland. One day, Tildy notices an online ad requesting participants for a lucid-dreaming study. She leaps at the opportunity, seeing it as a chance to reunite with Aidan in her dreamworld: “It could be like time travel,” she thinks, “only better—there [are] no consequences, no social cost. What if her days of failure with her family, the monotony at work, and the regret in her peaceful moments [are] only half her life? What if, at night, she could go to Ireland and do all that she wished, without having to face who she had been, or who she had become?” She soon finds herself in Dream Galway, working as an instructor at the local university, spending time with her Nana at the family cottage, and rekindling her love for Aidan. As Tildy tries to relive happier times in the dream world, her father pursues his interest in selling the family’s land in Galway to make some cash, and Aidan is now a chef with his own famous restaurant. Can Tildy find the satisfaction she desires in her lucid dreams? More importantly, can she translate it to waking life?
Woodsey’s prose is oneiric even in the novel’s waking portions. The lucid dreams are elegantly rendered, as here, when Tildy returns to Galway in her sleep: “The cool air tumbled to her, ripe with the familiar tang of coastal plants and the open sea. She looked around, her eyes watering. It felt like more than a dream here, more even than reality. Like she had voyaged into the heart of the ache she carried within her.” The premise is an intriguing one, and the hard-edged satire with which Woodsey handles Tildy’s family and life in New York is a treat. The scenes (both dreamed and real) set in the Emerald Isle are portrayed with the gauzy sentimentality Irish Americans often adopt with regard to the west of Ireland; Woodsey seems to be commenting on this sort of escapist fetishization, but the satire here is subtler. The supporting characters are sometimes thinly drawn, and the book has occasional pacing issues. Despite these minor flaws, however, the novel casts a definite spell over the reader, who can’t help but be drawn into Tildy’s fantasies. It’s a triple escape, after all: into a dream, over the sea, to the arms of a lost love.
An inventive novel about wishes and regret.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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