by Rosalind Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2024
A brilliant and keen work about being fully alive.
A novel about a day in the life of a studious Oxford undergraduate.
Annabel rises at the crack of dawn and readies herself to write a paper about Shakespeare’s sonnets. As she reads the poems, she recalls the advice of her tutor, a medievalist, to “spend as many hours as [she] could simply sitting with the text.…Look away from the text and out the window if you have to, try and pause your mind on the one thing. Focus on the experience of you reading this text now.” Brown’s gorgeously written debut is a hypnotic meditation on being attentive—on Annabel’s attempts to wrestle meaning out of Shakespeare’s poetry on this particular day and to establish a strict routine that will elevate her mind above everything else more generally. The only problem is that Annabel is human. She glances out the window and “holy shit”—the world is shrouded in mist and she’s pulled away from the sonnets to go for a walk; she must concede to bodily functions; she needs coffee; she’s cold or hungry or distracted by the thought of Rich, an older family friend who is pursuing her. In a sneaky way, the novel makes a passionate argument for distraction: While Annabel fanatically tries to discipline herself into being uber-focused, her imagination leads her astray again and again, especially toward figures she’s invented, in particular the “SCHOLAR” and the “SEDUCER,” two men whose identities she easily slips into and whose homoerotic friendship she spins out in endless variations. Brown’s attentiveness to the suppleness of language and the poetry of everyday life makes this slim novel absolutely transporting. In the closing pages, Annabel thinks, “Today has been—” and then she doesn’t, and perhaps can’t, finish the thought.
A brilliant and keen work about being fully alive.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780374613013
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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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
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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