Guaranteed to make your heart beat faster.
A Chicago medical student is disillusioned by love until she meets a passionate artist in this debut novel.
As a third-year medical student, Ghanaian American narrator Angela Appiah practically wrote the textbook on firstborn-daughter expectations. At 25, Angie still has little room for failure under the watchful eyes of her parents, who expect nothing less than perfection. Unfortunately, perfection is sorely lacking in Angie’s personal life; for starters, she just got dumped by her boyfriend of six months. Her sister, Tabatha, insists that Angie’s constant heartbreak is due to her choosing to date the “low-hanging fruit” who label her an “ethnic, erudite fling.” That said, Angie can’t help but dream of white coats more than white weddings when there are future-defining tests to study for. Enter Ricky Gutiérrez, a handsome young graphic designer she meets in a public garden. She’s immediately smitten: He’s flirtatious, kind, and way too good to be true—which Angie finds out is not a metaphor when he reveals he has a girlfriend. While Angie would like nothing more than to forget her chance meeting with Ricky, fate keeps bringing them together. He volunteers at the pediatric ward in the hospital where she performs her rotations; his best friend, Shae, is in love with her best friend, Nia; and he even has tickets to the same Beyoncé concert. The more time Angie spends with Ricky, the less she can fight her overwhelming attraction toward him, but is she willing to let herself get hurt by him again? Author Obuobi, a physician and cartoonist, is in her wheelhouse chronicling the hectic, and sometimes solitary, life of a medical student. The often witty footnotes, frequently describing medical jargon or Ghanaian traditions, add an amusing flair to Angie’s personality, but the novel’s true strength shines in its more serious moments. Encounters with Ricky’s father, who’s overdosing on heroin, and a 15-year-old gunshot victim powerfully depict the heartbreaking realities that are commonplace in Angie's line of work and how her passion for helping people is where her true success lies.
Guaranteed to make your heart beat faster.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-320914-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
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
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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