These tales offer unquestionably sharp writing, but they repeatedly go over similar ground.
A collection of short stories explores marriage, fidelity, restlessness, and desire.
Each of this volume’s 14 tales features female protagonists, many of whom are in their 60s. The opening story, “Framing the Picture,” is a meditation on life and death, focusing on a woman whose husband goes through emotional changes when his mother falls ill. The couple decide to take her and her companion into their home, which leads to a stark reevaluation of their own relationship. The following tale, “Hurricane,” introduces Alice, a social worker and writer, and Douglas, a university history professor, a married couple whose lives begin to take divergent paths. When Alice’s affair with an aspiring healer fails to provide the comfort in life she is missing, she considers a drastic exit strategy. In “Sleuth,” Helen begins a relationship with a married man and, despite being in love with him, tries online dating in her quest for companionship in New York City. Meanwhile, in “Artifacts,” a 67-year-old woman also joins a dating website and attempts to navigate the “labyrinth” of possible relationships. Wineberg creates psychologically realistic characters by delivering concise, revealing glimpses into their psyches: Helen “felt adrift, constructing a new life, facing the visceral realization that there was more time behind her than ahead.” The author is keenly observant, and the collection is punctuated with many fine descriptive passages: “An old, bent woman with gray hair, who hobbles with a cane and wears a long brown raincoat and black orthopedic shoes, clumsy as boats.” But despite being well crafted, the stories prove thematically repetitive. “Framing the Picture” and “We Worry About the Wrong Things” deal with parental illness and “Sleuth” and “Artifacts,” with online dating. This allows Wineberg to approach such subjects from a variety of angles, but the tales often read like scant reworkings of the same plot. Even with regard to description, in which the author often excels, character sketches can also prove repetitive, with a reliance on adjectives like bulky. The collection lacks the necessary variation to maintain readers’ attention. Wineberg is a skilled writer, and this book may well appeal to women facing similar challenges, but in terms of scope, it misses the mark.
These tales offer unquestionably sharp writing, but they repeatedly go over similar ground.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-947175-56-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Serving House Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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