A kooky treasure, rooted in the deeply literary, slightly askew interior world that makes this author’s work so fine.
A writing professor haunted by mysteries in her past—and by moths, bridges, unfinished student stories, and her husband’s lover’s nightguard—returns to the scene of her parents’ deaths.
This book, which centers on uncanny coincidences and a fatal bridge collapse, enters the world in the immediate wake of the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, adding a poignant depth charge to the sophisticated dark comedy this author is known for. Coll, who successfully mined her career as a bookstore events planner in Bookish People (2022), now gives us Cassie Klein, an endearing woman who teaches fiction at a community college and finds herself losing sleep over the predicaments never resolved in student work: “Sometimes I wonder if I am anyone at all, or just a composite of the people I know and the stories I’ve read.” But Cassie is also carrying around a few stories of her own: the very public mistakes of her Richard Gere–look-alike weatherman husband, whose relationship with their supposed family friend is revealed when the woman’s dental apparatus shows up on Cassie’s nightstand, and the enigma of her parents’ deaths in a (real) 1967 West Virginia bridge collapse when she was just 2, the same one that inspired the 2002 movie The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere as a weatherman. As the book opens, a few days before Christmas, Cassie is heading over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to spend the holiday Jewish style (i.e., eating Chinese food) with the aunt and uncle who raised her, the former a beloved NPR personality. A moth in her car causes some problems on the way, and then, as usual, her aunt and uncle won’t answer a single question about what happened to her parents. But this time, Cassie tears out in her ancient Audi for West Virginia, where she will find everything she’s looking for, and then some. Coll’s deadpan narrative voice, once it hits you, is like when a stand-up comic finds your funny bone and you just can’t stop laughing. And yet the laughter never fails to somehow encompass the obduracy of loss and other woes of this mortal coil.
A kooky treasure, rooted in the deeply literary, slightly askew interior world that makes this author’s work so fine.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781400234141
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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