Mackler knows how to shape scenes and characters but offers an oddly dated, privileged version of feminism lite.
Three divorced mothers in Manhattan join forces to create an app “to right marital inequalities” in this breezy look at gender imbalance.
Independently wealthy business school dropout Madeline Wallace, who has been happily divorced since her ex-husband transferred to London shortly after their daughter was born 14 years ago, borders on obsessive in how much she loves single motherhood. Lauren Zuckerman loves her 12-year-old twin daughters, too, but having recently gotten divorced after learning her ex-husband was having sex with prostitutes, she now regrets that she gave up a high-powered tech career to freelance and carry more of the parenting load. Literacy teacher Sophie Smart, who doesn't talk much about her bisexuality, struggles to support her sons, 12 and 7, with minimal help from her ex-husband, who has married and had a baby with a successful lawyer Sophie can't help both envying and liking. During a dinner celebrating Lauren’s divorce, Madeline half-seriously suggests that Lauren should develop an app to help women monetize the chores and, more importantly, the “mental load” of being a wife. Lauren takes Madeline’s idea and runs with it. The viewpoints shift among the three as the app develops, grows, and suddenly catches fire. Lauren handles the tech, Madeline the finance, and Sophie client relations. What starts as a socially conscious novel about the plight of women becomes an increasingly lightweight romp. Although “mental load” remains the main reference point throughout the book, the emphasis shifts to romance (plus sex) and relatively minor, ultimately solvable child-rearing crises, what Madeline acknowledges are “first-world problems.” There is surprisingly little social texture; these likable-enough women live in a world without racial tension or political anxiety. Although Mackler’s protagonists are around 40 and would have been barely 20 at the turn of the 21st century, they could easily populate an updated Sex and the City.
Mackler knows how to shape scenes and characters but offers an oddly dated, privileged version of feminism lite.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-9821-5879-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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