An uninspired snapshot of the country’s current moment.
In Duffy’s sequel to Stockboy (2013), Phillip Doherty works at a novelty store again and feels torn between the East and West coasts—and between two different women.
As this novel opens, Phillip is despondent. His second book was a critical success but a commercial failure and he and his fiancee, Melissa, are having relationship problems, in part, due to financial strain. She works tenaciously at her job, but Phillip struggles to find a position. He eventually resigns himself to working, again, as a stockboy at Milton’s World of Fun—this time in San Diego instead of New York. As the pressures of everyday life build, Phillip finds himself looking at online-dating websites and becomes enamored with a teacher named LeAnn Kennedy. Melissa and Phillip soon agree to separate, and Phillip then decides to drive to New York to start his life over despite Californian LeAnn’s romantic overtures. Almost as soon as Phillip arrives, an unnamed virus strikes the country, causing closures and layoffs in the city and elsewhere. Lonely Phillip finds his heart pulled back to San Diego by both Melissa and LeAnn. Duffy traverses a lot of ground in this novel. By effectively setting the action duringthe current Covid-19 pandemic, Duffy offers intriguing insights into the plight of workers deemed essential or nonessential as well as the measures businesses take as they struggle to stay afloat. However, the prose feels flabby and polemic. Characters discuss how the country has become a “stockboy nation” because, as Phillip says, “We’re a bunch of people peddling items other people created to make money to survive.” The repetition cements Duffy’s point but does nothing to develop the argument further. The dialogue is often stilted and unnecessarily expository, and although Duffy provides glimpses of Melissa’s and LeAnn’s inner lives, the focus largely remains on Phillip, who’s often passive and indecisive. When Phillip receives a visit in the latter part of the novel, it’s a pleasant surprise, but it doesn’t affect him very much as a character.
An uninspired snapshot of the country’s current moment.Pub Date: June 11, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-65-007277-5
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2020
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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