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COLORED TELEVISION

That’s entertainment.

When her second novel hits a wall, a biracial California writer makes a desperate attempt to start a TV career.

One of the funniest scenes in this brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect book happens early on, in a flashback to the party in Brooklyn where Jane met Lenny, her husband and the father of their two kids. Feeling that she’s aging out of the dating game, Jane has recently consulted an “intuitive psychodynamic counselor with a specialty in racial alchemy,” aka a psychic, who told her she’s about to meet her future husband, a funny, tall, handsome Black man who would be wearing “West Coast shoes.” But when she meets Lenny, who seems to perfectly fit this description, he’s with a very possessive white girlfriend. “Ebony and ivory, together in disharmony...perhaps because it was her origin story, she could not bear the sight of interracial love.” She calls the psychic from the party to confirm. The psychic says it’s definitely him, and then goes into a rant against intermarriage. “Listen, our ancestors didn’t survive the horrors of the Middle Passage so some Caucasoid poet could miscegenate us out of existence.” He also says that if she doesn’t get this guy, she’ll be alone for 24 years. That gets her moving. And since Senna is married to the writer Percival Everett, it’s kind of fun to imagine that this intellectual, anti-capitalist, abstract visual artist husband is sort of...yeah. But that’s just one of the great things. The rant about teaching Gen Z versus millennial college students is sure to kill any college professor (“She had in recent years begun to assign only minimalist autofiction by queer POC authors to her undergraduates, and she had to admit it was a better classroom experience for all”), and the story of Jane’s doomed second novel, an opus on biracial characters in history that she’s spent 10 years writing, is literary satire par excellence, like R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface or Everett’s Erasure. Anyone who’s ever been obsessed with a Hanna Andersson catalog: You are also the target market. The only reason we said “almost perfect” earlier is that there’s a big plot twist that doesn’t quite compute, but if you care, that makes one of us.

That’s entertainment.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024

ISBN: 9780593544372

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024

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INTERMEZZO

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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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