Some interesting ideas don’t mesh well with a whole lot of melodrama.
Summers in Puglia forge fraught bonds between a privileged girl from Turin and three local boys in a through-the-years saga jam-packed with events.
Bern, Nicola, and Tommaso live on the farm adjacent to Teresa's grandmother’s home, and Teresa is fascinated by the trio from the instant she spots them taking an illicit nighttime swim in her grandmother’s pool when she's 14. By the time she’s 17, she and Bern are lovers, which arouses Nicola’s and particularly Tommaso’s jealousy. Bern’s devotion to Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees none-too-subtly flags him as given to extremes, and as the novel flashes forward to 2012, Tommaso’s drunken revelations to 32-year-old Teresa reveal that the boys’ bond was closer and weirder than she ever knew. Then we’re whisked back to 2003, when Teresa inherits her grandmother’s estate, which includes the farm where Bern, Tommaso, and some new friends—Nicola glaringly not among them—are now squatting. Still fixated on Bern, Teresa joins their commune devoted to sustainable living and guerrilla activism in defense of the environment. Incident piles on top of incident: The commune breaks up; Teresa and Bern have trouble conceiving a child and decide to get married to raise money for infertility treatments; those don’t work, so she sets Bern free by pretending she’s been unfaithful. What all this has to do with the insistently reiterated theme of Bern’s yearning for absolutes is murky—until Tommaso’s confession resumes, and readers learn what drove Bern to the act that results in his fleeing Italy. His final meeting with Teresa has touching moments, muffled by the extreme improbability of the circumstances. Grappling with material similar to Richard Powers’ masterful The Overstory (2018), Giordano gets bogged down in plot and fails to persuasively convey his characters’ ideological passions. Bern remains an enigma, as does Teresa’s devotion to him.
Some interesting ideas don’t mesh well with a whole lot of melodrama.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984877-31-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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