A sometimes angry, sometimes sardonic, but ultimately optimistic view of humanity.
Cabiya—a Puerto Rican writer who lives in the Dominican Republic—turns a military thriller about the 1965 Dominican civil war into a contemporary fairy tale about a young boy whose innocent goodness has the power to change lives.
The narrator of this novel, full of “disquisitions and digressions and detours,” is recounting these two stories to specific listeners. While their identities are not fully revealed until much later, from early on it’s clear that they’re hearing a braided tale about their father and grandfather. But this is no Princess Bride. The 1965 uprising was very real, and Cabiya offers an immersion into the Dominican Republic of the time and a history lesson on the U.S.’s problematic role in upending Dominican democracy. In this fictionalized version of events, American officers become involved in questionable schemes involving valuable gold ingots. As a result, heroic Dominican revolutionary leader Puro Maceta, a saintly (fictional) mix of Che Guevara and Jesus—both pointedly referenced in the novel—is betrayed by a Judas-like companion. Puro spends the last hours before his murder making love, and a decade later the son he and his beloved conceived is “perfect,” a mix of sweetness and wisdom beyond his years. Following rainbows caused by sprinklers on a golf course, which is coincidently owned by the people who caused his father’s death, 10-year-old Maceta finds small treasures, discarded everyday objects like a bird feeder, a bicycle chain, and a Magic 8 Ball, that inadvertently transform his neighbors’ lives; the notebook in which Maceta names and describes his discoveries is the book’s most charming element. But the villains from the war years continue to prey on Maceta’s neighbors in ugly ways involving sex and money until the convoluted plot concerning those still-missing ingots comes to fruition. Good and evil, love and violence are dualities at play as innocence is threatened but prevails.
A sometimes angry, sometimes sardonic, but ultimately optimistic view of humanity.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781662602511
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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