An entertaining, deeply imagined literary melodrama.
Oddball New Jersey kids grow up with family values that grow increasingly sinister in McConnell’s labyrinthine coming-of-age novel.
The author centers the story on Darius Van Nest, an eccentric elementary school student at Lawrence Academy in Westerbrook, New Jersey, who’s convinced of his own “illustriousness” and fixated, to the dismay of his English teacher, Jane Brzostovsky, on the incestuous dysfunctions of the infamous Borgia family. Darius’ adoptive parents—his wealthy father Oliver, who’s given to nasty put-downs and Holocaust denial; and his mother Sohaila, a beautiful and shallow Iranian immigrant—are equally off-kilter, especially after Oliver lets Sohaila move her lover into the mansion. Darius’ only friend is classmate Barry Paul, an ordinary 12-year-old kid who’s abused by a manipulative adult, which leaves festering psychological wounds. McConnell follows these characters through the 1980s and ’90s. Darius drifts through Columbia University, Paris, and relationships with several men, including Alan Wilkinson, an aloof student of the philosophy of mathematics; and Rolf, a kindly German aristocrat. Jane is roped into a scheme by Darius’ childhood French tutor, David Caperini, to sell valuable artworks stolen from the Van Nest mansion, and Barry returns home after years out West and reconnects with a wealthy lawyer, Preston Sayles. McConnell’s often darkly comic narrative depicts families as snake-pits of subtle power plays, rich men as unbalanced, and social life as an awkward struggle to paper cheerful good manners over fear, resentment, and boredom. His prose is full of brilliantly evocative character sketches: “Oliver was silent at first. Rude. He flared his nostrils. He sat perfectly still and seemed to count something by means of the nostril-flarings….like a lizard, motionless except for its reptilian dewlap flexing. McConnell’s superb eye for detail reveals layered dramas in a single piercing glance: “One couple was almost lost in shadow in the back. The girl, in tears maybe, bent over her knees. She looked sickened by something her boyfriend had told her. The boy was torturing a matchbook, staring at it with clockmaker’s concentration and an air of contempt.” From a tangle of inappropriate, unpropitious relationships, McConnell unspools sharp-eyed psychological insights.
An entertaining, deeply imagined literary melodrama.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798988282952
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Itna Press
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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