An impressive set of stories from a skilled observer of the human animal.
Men and women struggle to find the good in the bad in Davidson’s fiction collection.
Life can get serious fast. In the first story in Davidson’s newest collection, a man grapples with his ex-wife’s early-onset Alzheimer’s. His daughter wants him to let the woman move in with him, something he is loath to do—but when his ex-wife is found beaten and possibly raped in a city park, the stakes become significantly higher. In another story, a college campus budget analyst gets into an argument with a foreign photographer taking pictures of him on campus. The man turns out to be a visiting artist, and he wants to make the analyst the subject of his next project. The photographer compares himself to Kafka: “He was the poet of the bureaucracy. What he did in his fiction, I try to do with my lens. That is why I came to America.” A third tale follows a boy on a fishing trip with his father attempting to reciprocate the patriarch’s gruff efforts at bonding, stymied by a roiling resentment he feels about his parents’ recent divorce. Across six stories and one novella, Davidson follows characters learning to live in a world not as they want it to be, but as it is. Nowhere is this tension as apparent as in the title novella, in which a Buddhist monk quits his monastery after seven years and moves in with his surf bum brother. “You’re stepping back into the material world—lust, lies, and corruption!” the brother encourages him. “Only one way to do it. Jump in with both feet!” As the former monk grapples with the crises that led him into—and then away from—the monastery, he gleans an entirely different sort of wisdom from his far-from-enlightened brother. Davidson’s prose is by turns clever and soulful, capturing his characters at their most curmudgeonly before dragging them, often against their will, toward greater vulnerability. Though the novella is the strongest entry, there’s not a bad one here.
An impressive set of stories from a skilled observer of the human animal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781960329486
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Cornerstone Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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