Lyrically brutal.
A Southern gothic coming-of-age story from the author of The Summer That Melted Everything (2016).
The eponymous narrator of McDaniel’s second novel is born in 1954, one of eight children. Her family is on the road as her father follows work throughout her early childhood, but the Carpenters eventually settle in the town of Breathed, Ohio. The house Betty’s father, Landon, has chosen for his family is a dilapidated Victorian that’s empty because its previous inhabitants disappeared. The children wonder if the house is cursed, but, as the story progresses, it seems increasingly likely that the hardship that haunts this family is hereditary and would have followed them anywhere. As a little girl, Betty’s world is defined by the fanciful stories and traditional Cherokee tales Landon tells her. As she grows older, she must learn to endure terrible secrets and acts of cruelty that are at odds with the magical view of the universe her father tried to give her. This is not the first time McDaniel has taken readers to Breathed. Her debut invited the devil himself to this Appalachian town, and, while this new novel hews closer to realism, the voices recorded here are overblown to the point of fantasy. Betty and Landon are both presented as gifted storytellers, but virtually every character who speaks in this novel talks like a poet or a prophet. There are moments when the prose becomes kitschy: “These stories, like all the rest, had become down-home myths full of easily swallowed moons and deep-dug sorghum cane.” And sometimes whatever it is McDaniel is trying to express is overwhelmed by strenuously artful language: “I would come to learn that between heaven and hell, Breathed was a piece of earth inside the throb, where lizards were crushed beneath wheels and the people spoke like thunder grinding on thunder.” Nevertheless, Betty is a compelling protagonist, a character readers may be willing to follow through clichés, hothouse prose, and depictions of tremendous violence.
Lyrically brutal.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65707-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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