Extremely easy to read and equally hard to forget.
When London schoolteacher Dolores O’Shea finds her husband’s sex doll in the garage, a neatly organized life begins to crumble.
It takes a long time to realize this book is not really a comedy, because Crossan is a wonderfully funny writer. In the narrator’s first interaction with Tessa Winters, a troubled student whose problems escalate throughout the novel, we learn that Tessa’s cousin Neil, now in prison, buried his girlfriend alive in a big suitcase, but forgot to take off her Apple watch—so she called her mom from the grave. A few pages later, a childhood recollection: Dolores (nicknamed Doughy and, even more worrisomely, Dolly) and her sister, Jacinta, fought so hard over a doll that they pulled her head off, then played separately with the two parts until their mother reattached the head, saying, “You can forget about a hamster.” And while Zoey the sex doll does provide plenty of absurd humor—Crossan has imagined her AI responses so brilliantly it hurts—she plays a much more profound role in what is ultimately a moving, troubling, even heartbreaking book. After Dolores confronts her anesthesiologist (of course he is!) husband about the doll, and he responds by packing up and moving out without a word, Zoey becomes Dolores’ best friend. She buys her fancy size 4 espadrilles, gives her magazines to read and vegan cooking shows to watch, and struggles to leave her behind when she goes to visit her troubled sister in New York. Every part of this book is brilliantly constructed to reflect a different aspect of the central problem, which is numbness, and also something that happened in the girls’ childhood that takes the whole novel to emerge. Crossan is well known both here and across the Atlantic as a YA writer, and her second adult novel firmly places her in a group with Sally Rooney, Caroline O’Donoghue, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and Eimear McBride, millennial Irish women writers we love.
Extremely easy to read and equally hard to forget.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780316428606
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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