Melvin deftly illustrates that family alliances may be as complicated as political ones.
Violence and chicanery, love and survival, poverty and careless opulence: Everything’s in play in Melvin’s sprawling family saga set in the Philippines—her U.S. debut.
Lali and Pilar—two daughters of a political dissident who, with his family, fled their homeland for California—have fundamentally different temperaments. Outgoing Lali seeks attention and experience, while the more reserved Pilar is devoted to her family’s honor and preserving its legacy. More importantly, Lali is in a relationship with Arturo, the godson of an authoritarian strongman, their father’s rival, who shares characteristics with former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. After the girls’ father is assassinated, Arturo whisks the family to Manila and the safety that will be afforded to them as part of his family. Lali (now married to Arturo), Pilar, and their mother return to a fraught political situation, and their private lives become enmeshed in a political web of shifting alliances and byzantine dealmaking. When Lali becomes pregnant, subtle shifts occur in the balance of power (emotional and sexual) between the sisters, and both young women embark on paths unimaginable to them earlier. Grounded in the turmoil of recent political, military, and economic life in the Philippines, Melvin’s characters grapple with moral dilemmas that grow increasingly complex as their story unfolds. Themes of poverty, exploitation of women, and inhumane wartime brutality underlie the narrative, which unfolds against a backdrop of scenic beauty and rural poverty. Melvin’s storyline mines recent (and not-so-recent) Philippine history and is delivered with a healthy dose of drama, conveying a milieu where superstition and folklore can be as controlling as the gaze of television cameras. Peppered with moments of cinematic violence, the account of a family in flux also challenges readers to determine how everything changed in the family’s dynamics. As the girls’ father once observed, life is determined by a series of subtle, perhaps imperceptible ruptures that can have enormous consequences.
Melvin deftly illustrates that family alliances may be as complicated as political ones.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-773-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
