A well-rendered examination of the Vietnam War on the home front.
Two young cousins struggle to maintain their close relationship despite their opposing views of the Vietnam War in Black-Gould and Hardiman’s novel.
Cate is your typical Jersey City high school senior and peace lover, and what a time to be one: The year is 1969, and war is raging in Vietnam. As TV news brings the carnage of battle into American homes for the first time, national support for the war is plummeting. Nevertheless, Cate’s cousin, Albie, is as gung-ho about becoming a soldier as he’s ever been. Albie is the kind of kid who grew up playing make-believe war, gorging himself on the battlefield heroics of his parents’ generation, the soldiers who returned from World War II victorious, if damaged. Despite overwhelming protestations from his entire family, Albie enlists in the military right after high school graduation, all but guaranteeing a ticket to the front lines overseas. Cate, shattered and made furious by his decision, must attempt to move forward with her life. She knows she wants to flee her small town for the big city, and though she dreams of life in New York City’s Greenwich Village, she can’t quite afford it, stuck as she is in a menial typing job. Though Cate’s mother’s dream is for her daughter to become one of the glamorous, eligible bachelorettes in the secretarial pool, Cate is miserable in that environment from the start: “The doors parted to the clatter of typewriters and sour smell of smoke—and yelling. A tall woman, dressed in black…berated a typist cowering in her seat.” Cate’s distaste for regimentation is evident from an early age, as readers see in chapters that flash back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Cate was a rebellious asker of questions (qualities not appreciated in her strict Catholic school), and Albie always tried to protect her out of love, drawing attention away from her back to himself.
The manner in which readers’ perception of the characters’ relationship grows in concert with Cate and Albie’s coming of age works well, providing important context that allows the forthcoming tragedies to hit home. While navigating the city, Cate makes a friend whose writing explores the suffering of Vietnam veterans, opening Cate’s eyes to another side of the war and helping her to see what those very same soldiers she resents might be going through. Novels about the Vietnam War have become commonplace, but Black-Gould and Hardiman’s work manages to carve out territory that feels contemporary by not shying away from issues that resonate today—including the treatment of LGBTQ+ people and the divisiveness a war can foment within a country—which are as relevant right now as they ever were. Though this novel may not be groundbreaking relative to other accounts of the conflict, it does succeed in presenting characters who are memorable enough to keep readers engaged throughout the story and beyond the final page. Cate, in particular, travels an arc that satisfies both in its literary aims and its emotional resonance.
A well-rendered examination of the Vietnam War on the home front.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9798990328600
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Green Grotto Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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