A quick-witted exploration of the underbelly of college sports.
A college administrator gets her dream promotion but finds herself embroiled in scandal, mystery, and sexism when she takes the position.
One morning, Nora Bennet gets a call from her boss, Sal Higgins, who’s just been fired from his job as athletic director at sports-crazy Renton University—the result of a news article accusing him of bribing professors to inflate grades of student athletes. Sal congratulates Nora, telling her she will take over the position he’s vacating. As thrilled as Nora is, she never anticipated the difficulties that would come with replacing a man as beloved, and also as shady, as Sal. A barrage of belligerent phone calls from angry donors ensues, and Nora begins to realize that Sal wasn’t the only Renton employee playing dirty. Amid rumors and suspicion, not to mention an ongoing NCAA investigation, Nora must continue running the school’s athletics while tolerating constant doubt about her abilities. As a woman in sports, she’s had to work twice as hard as the men around her, but as things at Renton grow increasingly complicated, she wonders if this time, her best won’t be good enough. The book follows Nora as well as three other women who are pulled into the scandal: Alexis, a professor who’s taught many of the athletes at issue; Anne, a student intern in the athletics department; and Lauren, Sal’s wife, all trying to navigate the complexities of the chaos Sal has left in his wake. This is a fast-paced, plot-driven novel, and the action doesn’t lag for a moment. The story deftly portrays how quickly friendships, reputations, and careers can be undone. At times, the narrative moves so quickly that actions feel as if they're coming from left field, and the setting could have been fleshed out. Even so, the realistic dialogue, unexpected twists, and energetic cast of characters will keep readers turning pages.
A quick-witted exploration of the underbelly of college sports.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781662516290
Page Count: 299
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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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