An original and potent comedy of manners with an ingenious final twist.
When a well-to-do British Nigerian couple and the wife's best friend drink way too much wine and whiskey, the fraught triangle of their relationship falls apart.
Agbaje-Williams' striking, often wickedly funny debut is set over the course of one day, divided into three sections. The first is narrated by a married woman whose lifelong best friend, Temi, arrives at her house at noon with wine, chips, and cigarettes. The two hang out and deconstruct Temi's recent dates; we learn that the wife and her husband have begun trying to get pregnant and that Temi sees this as a betrayal. Temi and the husband hate each other and always have. As the day progresses into evening, the second section of the book is told by the husband, the third by Temi. Agbaje-Williams brilliantly captures the inner monologue as well as the conversational style of each of the three, through which their whole cultural milieu takes shape around them, from the expectations of their Nigerian parents to their Smeg fridge and Tesco wine. The husband's section is the funniest as he rages in his head against his wife's friendship with Temi and recalls the history of insults he has endured. But whenever he complains about anything, like the fact that Temi has broken into a special bottle of wine he was saving, his wife says “Kim, there's people that are dying,” a Kardashian reference that he internalizes. “The thought that my wife’s friend was now privy even to our private text messages repulsed and enraged me. I quoted the Kardashians three times like a prayer then resolved to move past the situation for my own sanity and to avoid prison.” The last section is narrated by Temi, whose extreme ideas about men, women, and marriage allow her to rationalize her destructive behavior. As she and the husband move from passive-aggressive sniping to acts of war, as the empty bottles pile up in the recycling, she hatches an evil plan. With three unlikable, unreliable narrators, and with both patriarchal arrangements and feminist alternatives depicted as self-serving transactions, Agbaje-Williams throws caution to the wind and pulls off a surprise win.
An original and potent comedy of manners with an ingenious final twist.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780593540718
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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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