Sutanto’s hilarious triptych ends with a finale that could just as well have been titled “An Auntie You Can’t Refuse.”
Meddy Chan’s honeymoon with her dream mate is interrupted by theft, hostage taking, and abduction. But it’s nothing the aunties can’t handle.
At a chaotic celebration outside Jakarta, where Meddy’s extended family has gathered to celebrate Chinese New Year, a red gift packet containing the title deed to a valuable parcel of land in downtown Jakarta that Abraham Lincoln Irawan, who’s long carried a torch for Second Aunt Enjelin Chan, has earmarked for his creditor Julia Child Handoko, accidentally ends up in the hands of one of Meddy’s cousins. Learning of the mishap, Julia Child—a rival businessperson who’s the perfectly law-abiding head of a conglomerate, not another triad leader, Abi blandly assures Meddy—pressures the family to recover the deed by imprisoning Nathan Chan, Meddy’s new husband. It’s a testimony to the size of that family gathering that the discovery of a photograph showing the gift recipient kicks off a lively discussion of who she is and that the identification of the young woman in the photo with her as Annabelle leads to a further discussion of whose daughter she is. Because Rochelle, the friend of Annabelle who ended up with the deed, is the granddaughter of Kristofer Kolumbes Hermansah, a third absolutely legitimate businessperson, the family’s attempt to retrieve it from Annabelle leads to still further complications. As the pot boils, the tone remains light and the frantic complications rollicking, though the four aunties, Meddy’s mother and her three sisters, make a much less powerful impression individually than as a group.
Sutanto’s hilarious triptych ends with a finale that could just as well have been titled “An Auntie You Can’t Refuse.”Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593546215
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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