A stunning book which paints the portrait of a broken life with honesty and compassion.
A young Swedish woman who has been brutally murdered spends her afterlife looking down on the Earth she has left behind.
Kristina is only 24 when she dies. She leaves behind her estranged parents, Raksha and Ivan, her dying husband, Shane, and her two children, Valle and Solveig, the elder taken by the state when he was 3 and the younger given up at birth to an adoptive family. Kristina also leaves behind the heroin addiction that gave her days immediate purpose and her murderer, an unnamed man who remembers her with more specific passion than anyone else in her abbreviated life. From her formless position in the afterlife, Kristina looks in on the people she left behind, both as their lives continue and as they existed in the significant moments she revisits as she drifts through a suddenly nonlinear experience of time. Yet, as cruel as the facts of Kristina’s life were—suffused with abandonment, abuse, sorrow, and death—the way she sees the world as it progresses without her is articulated with a kind of pragmatic hope. Nothing will change the facts of death or the bleakness that often precedes it, but what Kristina sees in Raksha as she struggles to live on as the mother of a murdered child; in Valle as he fights his own demons, so similar to his mother’s; in Solveig as she grows into the adult Kristina never had the chance to become are as real as the wasteland that spreads inside the mind of the murderer who chose Kristina to kill precisely because she seemed unafraid to die. In fragmented sections that echo with longing, loss, unutterable sorrow, and yet also a species of joy and light, Stridsberg explores the mind of a woman who gave up her life long before it was taken from her. There is a familiar tradition of dead-girl media in which “the only person of interest…is the murderer, and [the victim] is just a brief glimpse, a blur of green body, and then she is gone, out of the picture, disappearing into the depths of nothingness whence she came.” This book is the antidote to that kind of brutal anonymizing—a novel in which both the wicked and the sublime are scrutinized with the same care by the watchful eyes of the dead.
A stunning book which paints the portrait of a broken life with honesty and compassion.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-27269-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This propulsive thriller twists into the dark and bloody underbelly of the world of fine art.
The discovery that a revered artist’s sculpture contains a human bone sets off scandal and violence.
Art historian James Becker has what seems like a sweet deal. He’s the curator of the collection of the Fairburn Foundation, housed at a stately home owned by the Lennox family: Sebastian, Becker’s best friend, and his bitter mother, Lady Emmeline. Becker’s wife, Helena, was Sebastian’s fiancee first, but they’re all very civilized about it and happily awaiting the birth of her baby. The centerpiece of the Fairburn collection is works by the late Vanessa Chapman, an artist about whom Becker wrote his thesis, and with whom he is somewhat obsessed. Partly, it’s because of her great talent, but she was also a glamorous figure, a beauty who, as she became successful, sequestered herself on an isolated Scottish tidal island called Eris. She had a dark side—lots of stormy relationships, plus a philandering mooch of a husband who vanished without a trace a few decades ago. Her reputation, though, has risen after her death—so much so that the Fairburn has loaned some of her works to the Tate Modern. That’s where a forensic anthropologist sees one of her sculptures, made of found objects that include what’s described as an animal bone. The scientist is sure the bone is human, and soon Becker finds himself scrambling to prevent scandal. Vanessa willed her works and papers to the foundation, but some of them are still on Eris, guarded by her longtime friend Grace Haswell. A retired doctor, Grace lived with Vanessa off and on over the years and nursed her through her fatal cancer. It was a surprise when Vanessa left her estate not to Grace but to Douglas Lennox, Emmeline’s husband and Sebastian’s father. Douglas was Vanessa’s gallerist and lover, but the two had a nasty falling-out. Sebastian is so frustrated by Grace’s refusal to turn over all of the bequest that he’s ready to sue her, but Becker believes he can negotiate, so off to the the island he goes. He finds far more treachery and shocking secrets than he expected, past and present alike. Hawkins keeps her cast tight, her wild setting ominous, and her plot moving fast.
This propulsive thriller twists into the dark and bloody underbelly of the world of fine art.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9780063396524
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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