A strong, moving story about two memorable kids.
In Zimlich’s novel, two sisters in a San Diego suburb try desperately to rescue themselves from a dysfunctional situation.
In 1978, 9-year-old Panic McCormack and her 14-year-old sibling, PJ, find life tolerable only in the arid scrubland behind their ramshackle house in El Cajon, overlooking San Diego. “El Cajon” is Spanish for “the box,” and it’s named for the locale’s valley, its most prominent geological feature; it’s also a clear symbol of how these girls are trapped—especially with the promise of San Diego in the distance. Their father, Chet, who was traumatized by his service in Vietnam, has left them; their mother, Betsy, is a violent, barely functional alcoholic. PJ, as the older sister, does her best to protect and properly raise the precocious Panic. Twice in the space of a week they try to escape their home situation; the second time, they make it all the way to downtown San Diego, but it quickly becomes a hellscape. Will the pair find the better life they crave? Zimlich is a skilled writer who offers wonderful passages, such as this one, about a harried PJ: “But her words were limp, falling out of her like loose pages from an old book.” There are tantalizingly lush early descriptions of San Diego, suggesting a glimpse of the Promised Land. Indeed, the supposed Eden of that city and the baking desert of El Cajon suggest biblical parallels that hover over the narrative. Overall, the novel engagingly shows how kids are the ones that suffer the most in troubled families, and how things can go badly without a protector like PJ, who’s a wonderful and believable fictional creation. There are other good people around them, including caring neighbors who know that something is wrong in the McCormack house but are afraid to act directly; there are also characters like social worker Mrs. Perón, who’s not only clueless but nastily officious.
A strong, moving story about two memorable kids.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781949540574
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Steel Toe Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.
Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.
One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593418918
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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