Anyone who’s hit rock bottom can still get a shot at redemption if they’re willing to do what it takes.
Helping a sick horse gives a washed-up musician in his 60s a chance to make peace with his past.
“Please,” whispers Al Ward, “please give me the strength to pull the trigger and let it be over.” Al isn’t contemplating suicide. An old horse has wandered into the abandoned Nevada mining camp that Al calls home, and he wants to put it out of its misery. The camp belonged to his late great-uncle Mel, who mined it for years with no success. Al would stay there and dry out whenever the excesses of life as a journeyman guitarist and songwriter became too much. But now the horse, scarred and bleeding from a coyote bite, intrudes on the camp, where Al has been holed up and hiding from his demons. The horse doesn’t do anything to provoke him. It just stands there in the snow, right outside the assayer’s office where Al sleeps, eats, thinks, and still writes songs by lantern light. When Al decides to show mercy and points his old .357 at the animal, he tearfully realizes that he can’t kill the poor beast “because he felt that he and the horse were the same.” It’s a familiar, oft-told story of someone unexpectedly finding healing in the presence of an animal, but Vlautin makes that trope his own. His writing style is spare, restrained, unsentimental, yet full of emotion and force. A songwriter and band frontman, Vlautin understands the ups and downs of a touring musician’s life, and his experiences inform Al’s long career playing casinos from Las Vegas to Reno to Tahoe and beyond. Al has a gift for songwriting, and plenty of tortured musicians—including heartbreaker Mona and the self-destructive Sanchez Brothers—clamored after him to write hits for them. Al never wished for much in life, only, as he says of the horse, to “be all right and live an all right life.” He’s managed to have plenty of all right moments, especially during his short-lived marriage to his true love, Maxine. Helping the horse might give him a chance to have another one. After Al makes a long trek to get help, a friend teases him that what he’s done “says something. Most people wouldn’t cross the street to do something decent, and you walked thirty miles in the snow, and you’re a drunk, lazy musician.” But Al’s risky walk shows he’s more than that; he’s still full of surprises.
Anyone who’s hit rock bottom can still get a shot at redemption if they’re willing to do what it takes.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780063346574
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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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