A touching tale that balances love, loss, and family drama.
Secrecy and deep sorrow complicate new beginnings in Kamata’s novel, told through the eyes of three women.
In 2021, Olivia Hamada, a newly unemployed American living in Japan, is grieving the loss of her brother, Ted, and hiding her divorce from everyone—including the 18-year-old twins whom she had with her Japanese ex-husband. It’s been more than a year since Ted’s unexpected death and pandemic travel restrictions have lifted, allowing Olivia, a former English-language writing instructor, and her children to travel to the United States to spread the last of Ted’s ashes and spend the summer with his widow, Parisa Hubbard, at her idyllic South Carolina beach house. Parisa, a successful fashion designer whose creations are inspired by her South Asian heritage, is ready to embrace a fresh chapter, but, fearing that she’ll upset Ted’s family, she keeps her big plans to herself. Lastly, readers meet Sophie, Olivia’s deaf daughter, who attends a specialized high school with only 12 students and is craving new experiences. Her wish is granted when she meets the eye-catching Dante, sparking a sweet, summer romance. Sophie vows to keep the relationship hidden, but this proves to be surprisingly difficult. When Olivia has a run-in with Devon Richards, a now-famous country singer from her past, she’s unable to resist their sizzling mutual attraction, which they must keep secret. At times, Kamata’s novel leans too heavily on backstory. However, the short chapters dedicated to each character, and tender moments interspersed with messy, rom-com-worthy entanglements, will keep readers intrigued. Lush images of sand and surf offer a breezy escape from tougher emotional scenes: “Farther up the beach, beyond the waving grass, people were gathering on decks and porches, firing up their grills, popping open bottles of beer, hanging their wet towels over railings.” References to Japanese and Indian traditions also enrich the pages. Kamata delicately weaves heartbreak with humor throughout the story, and authentically captures the complex inner lives of women at various stages navigating wildly different obstacles.
A touching tale that balances love, loss, and family drama.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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