A smart debut that feels rooted in the experiences of a generation and establishes McKenna as a gifted writer.
As a soon-to-be mom braces for major life changes, her best friend wrestles with a secret that could have enormous implications for the pregnancy.
This sparkling first novel focuses on the intertwined lives of three Londoners and their broader networks of friends and family, largely over the course of a single weekend in June 2019. Thirty-year-old art school graduate Maggie, her longtime boyfriend, Ed, and her best friend, Phil, have known each other since they were kids running around Basildon, a working-class town 40 minutes away by train; Ed’s mother and Phil’s parents are neighbors, and Phil’s older brother is Ed’s best friend. When Maggie tells Phil one Saturday that she’s pregnant and that she and Ed are moving back to Basildon to prepare for the baby, he doesn’t react the way she expects, but not for the reason she thinks. For Phil, the news rekindles a decade-old moral dilemma. Much as Phil has tried to put the past behind him, he knows something about Ed that Maggie doesn’t—a secret so big it could threaten Ed and Maggie’s relationship. With the impending addition of a baby to the mix, he feels more compelled than ever to reveal the truth. Concurrently, other problems arise in their peripheral social circle and beyond. Ed battles private demons. Phil’s older brother and Ed’s best friend, Callum, disappears. Phil and Callum’s mother, Rosaleen, is trying to figure out the best way to disclose her cancer diagnosis to Phil. Phil is sorting out his feelings for his housemate and hookup partner, Keith, who’s in an open relationship with another man, Louis. Things come to a head at a massive party held at Phil’s warehouse commune home on Saturday night in honor of the summer solstice. In another pair of hands, the compressed timeline and the size of the cast could have made for a disjointed reading experience, but McKenna toggles among the different characters and storylines with aplomb. What emerges is an empathetic portrait of millennials trying to build lives for themselves amid social, political, and ecological change.
A smart debut that feels rooted in the experiences of a generation and establishes McKenna as a gifted writer.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063319974
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
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