This illuminating paean to mixology is best read at your favorite bar or with ingredients nearby.
A 24-year-old California girl on her way to Harvard Law stops off behind a bar in Brooklyn.
Straton’s debut is two books in one—a thoroughly researched and mostly charming compendium of information about bartending and recipes for cocktails and a rather lugubrious account of her narrator Samantha “Sam” Fisher’s gap year employment at a drinking establishment called Joe’s Apothecary. Sam is at a low point emotionally and financially as she heads in for her interview, a long shot since women are rarely seen behind a bar. Sure enough, the place is staffed by three men, all named Dan, one of whom she had a messy encounter with a while back, but they decide to give her a chance. This Columbia graduate is nothing if not a dedicated student, and if her boring love life and slowly revealed traumatic backstory aren't sufficient to shake together a compelling plot, she will certainly find out what goes in a Negroni and a sidecar, and how and why and where and when as well. Each chapter opens with a cocktail recipe and is stuffed with trivia and lore—the purpose of the Snaiquiri (a minidaquiri shared at the beginning of a bar shift), the possible origins of the word cocktail (ginger stuffed up a horse’s behind?), backstory on the original Trader Vic’s tiki bar (shut down due to tackiness by Donald Trump), and much more. Sometimes she goes further than strictly necessary—dictionary definition of mocktail, anyone?—but her tips on effective Instagram posts are worth bookmarking. This novel is a close cousin of Stephanie Danler’s bestselling Sweetbitter, but the characters don't have as much star power, and the will to educate is more dominant. Tics in the storytelling voice—endless clauses strung together with and, endless asides beginning with “Once upon a time”—become annoying in the absence of narrative momentum.
This illuminating paean to mixology is best read at your favorite bar or with ingredients nearby.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-80907-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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