A pleasure to read, with characters and themes that linger long after the final page.
Families come in many varieties, all of them equally fraught, in a dozen new stories from British writer Hadley.
Feckless bohemian parents get withering portraits in “My Mother’s Wedding” (not her first, needless to say) and “Funny Little Snake”; the latter is a particularly poignant tale of a neglected 9-year-old girl and a second wife who reluctantly comes to feel responsible for her. These two stories, like many in the collection, stop rather than end with people poised on the brink of change and no guarantees things will turn out well. Hadley’s work, very much in the realistic tradition of classic English fiction, is old-fashioned in the best sense: Characters’ personalities and backstories are fully drawn and set against thickly detailed physical and social surroundings. The childhood home where three middle-aged sisters assemble to visit their hospitalized mother in “The Bunty Club” is “a stolid Victorian villa” set on a hillside dotted with houses “intended to accommodate a certain sort of privileged, discreet, unexceptional, unchanging middle-class existence—which had changed after all, because it hardly existed any longer.” Hadley shifts through each of the at-odds sisters’ perspectives, a frequent technique of hers to remind us that people’s inner lives do not necessarily match others’ views of them. This is particularly effective in “Dido’s Lament,” which portrays a chance encounter between a former husband and wife almost entirely from her point of view until the very end, when a glimpse into his thoughts shows that the comfortable, affluent post-divorce existence she has glimpsed with chagrin is “all so that [she] could get to visit it some day, and see that he’d managed to have a life without her.” The mastery she has honed over a decades-long career makes Hadley’s gaze as sharp as her empathy is expansive; each tale feels as satisfying as a full-length novel despite—or perhaps because of—the ambiguous endings.
A pleasure to read, with characters and themes that linger long after the final page.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593536193
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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
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
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