A multilayered tale of innocence and guilt from a gifted storyteller.
An old man records key moments in his early life, centered on the betrayal that defined his later years.
Banks’ previous novel, Foregone (2021), had a dying filmmaker trying to set his life’s record straight as former students videotape him for a tribute. In the new work, his main character, 81-year-old Harley Mann, is recalling his adolescence, when he made a life-changing choice. His is the voice behind a box of audiotapes found in a library basement and here being "edited and shaped...into a more or less coherent narrative" by Russell Banks, according to the foreword. Early in the narrative, Harley’s recently widowed mother moves her four boys in 1902 to the New Bethany Shaker community on 7,000 acres in Florida. It’s a small, close-knit group defined by hard work, honesty, equal rights for women, and celibacy. Harley finds a mentor in the group’s male leader, Elder John, and falls in love with Sadie Pratt, a consumptive young woman who comes to live in the community when her nearby sanitarium closes. While New Bethany seems like an idyllic, even magical, place, there’s also discord and envy, natural calamities, and foreshadowing of a “national scandal” for the community. After a long buildup, the scandal itself fills some 70 pages of solid crime and courtroom drama. Harley went on to work in Florida real estate, including buying the 7,000 acres of New Bethany, which he eventually sold, in possibly questionable deals, to Walt Disney. Behind any latter-day Eden or utopia or Magic Kingdom lurks some unoriginal sins. That’s one of several themes at work here, but the core is the emotional mirror of memory, a construct of events and their recall, or, for a writer wondering how he will be remembered, a construct of his books and readers, for whom Banks may well be a prized piece of gray matter.
A multilayered tale of innocence and guilt from a gifted storyteller.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-53515-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
IN THE NEWS
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
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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