by Yan Lianke ; translated by Carlos Rojas ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 2021
Admirers of Yan’s work won’t be disappointed with this turn to straightforward narrative.
Chinese novelist Yan sets aside the “mythorealism” of books past to deliver a gritty, memorable story of love in a time of choler.
Revisiting his The Four Books (2015), Yan takes us to a mountain village where just about everyone is descended from the Confucian scholars known as the Cheng Brothers, to whom a temple is dedicated. Gao Aijun, one young man outside the Cheng clan, has returned to Chenggang after serving in the army just in time for the Cultural Revolution. Married into the local Communist Party chief’s family—“it was precisely because he was Party secretary that I married his daughter,” he admits—Gao is a man on the make; he also confesses to harboring a desire to kill his wife. His bad behavior builds when he falls in love at first sight with a beautiful outsider who is married to the local schoolteacher, Cheng Qingdong, who “appeared very cultured and intellectual and looked as though he were about to be swept away by the revolution.” Wooing her with a timely pitch—“Hongmei, let’s pursue revolution together”—Gao goes about waging a war on the village leadership and, as Mao commanded, destroying the monuments of old, serving his own interests even as he carries on the affair. The two make love where they can, even inside a tomb where “the smell of death and decay mixed with the scent of damp straw,” unappealingly enough, even as, one by one, those who stand in their way disappear from the scene. Hongmei isn’t quite Lady Macbeth, but she still spurs Gao to commit more crimes so that, “when half of this town government is yours, we won’t have to sneak around like thieves anymore.” Their revolutionary ardor dims a touch when they run afoul of bigger party bosses, however, and Yan’s study of power and class struggle becomes, in the end, a near-classic tragedy with the subtlest of nods to his version of magical realism.
Admirers of Yan’s work won’t be disappointed with this turn to straightforward narrative.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5812-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
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by Yan Lianke ; translated by Carlos Rojas
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by Yan Lianke ; translated by Carlos Rojas
by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2024
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”
A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.
Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780316258876
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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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
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