A sensitive portrait of a wounded woman.
A mother grapples with her daughter's death.
As in her last novel, Where Reasons End (2019), written shortly after her son killed himself, Li, winner of multiple literary awards, again imagines the effect of a child’s suicide, this time, on Lilia Liska, widowed 3 times, who has raised 5 children and the child of her dead daughter, Lucy, who killed herself at age 27, two months after giving birth. Now living in a senior facility where she treats other residents with cold condescension, Lilia devotes herself to reading and annotating the voluminous diaries of Roland Bouley, her former lover, an urbane older man she met when she was 16. Pregnant—with Lucy—from their first encounter, having seen him only 4 times afterward, she has become increasingly obsessed with him over the past several years after acquiring his diaries through the efforts of a local librarian: If she could understand him, she thinks, she might understand their emotionally volatile child. Roland, charming as he was, became a desultory, often self-absorbed bookseller who, Lilia suspects, “revised his diaries for dramatic effect” and “wore his lies like tailored suits.” He recounts, in sometimes repetitious detail, assorted lovers and two long-lasting attachments: with a worldly older woman, a forgotten poet who, like Lilia, had lost a child; and with his coolly elegant, self-possessed wife. As much as Lilia insists on her desire to memorialize Roland and to leave his annotated diaries to Lucy’s daughter, her real project is keeping Lucy alive. “I haven’t stopped arguing with Lucy for thirty-seven years,” she writes; “everything in my life is a part of that long argument with Lucy.” Although priding herself on her independence and hardness, her reflections reveal abiding grief, loneliness, and regret, which she refuses to confront. Regrets, she remarks, “are like weeds. You kill them before they grow and spread. Willpower is the strongest weed killer.” Lilia’s bitterness masks vulnerability that too rarely emerges from Li’s restrained narrative.
A sensitive portrait of a wounded woman.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-58912-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.
When their father dies on the cliffs of his California estate, estranged half-siblings unite to investigate possible foul play.
As Dave’s seventh novel opens, the reader learns something the characters don’t know: Hotel magnate Liam Noone did not fall by accident. He was pushed—by whom and for what reason are unclear. The police have deemed it an accident and closed the case, but his son, Sam, is not so sure. Though he hasn’t seen his half sister, Nora, in years, he shows up at her workplace in New York to ask her to go with him to California to investigate. This part of the story is told by Nora in the first person. We get a lot of information about Nora—she has recently lost both parents, she’s an authority on neuroarchitecture, she is engaged to a New York chef but has an ex in the wings—but somehow don’t get much of a feel for her as a person as she and Sam race around investigating leads and having defensive, snappy conversations. A second narrative thread begins 50 years in the past and follows the development of a romance between Liam and a woman named Cory, who is not one of his three ex-wives, nor is she a woman named Cece with whom he had a mysterious connection. The novel relies on the tension created by all these missing puzzle pieces to plunge swiftly forward, but there’s nothing really at stake—no strong suspects, no wrongly accused, no contested inheritance; it’s all just digging up the secrets of a dead person so his children can understand him now that it’s too late. Actually, nobody really understands each other in this book, and as the characters suspiciously keep each other at arm’s length, the effect extends to the reader as well. Other potentially interesting topics—neuroarchitecture (designing spaces that support emotional well-being), the high-end hotel business—are similarly set up but not explored.
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781668002933
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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