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: Oct. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798990328600
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Green Grotto Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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