A slim but fulfilling novel in stories about the madness of families.
A girl attempts to survive her chaotic Canadian family in Tocher’s literary novel.
Alice Montgomery, the only daughter in a household with four kids, is bookish and probably the best adjusted of the lot—not that that’s saying much. Her mom, Maddy, moved their family to Calgary after Alice’s dad, Jon, died of a heart attack. Her oldest brother, Jeffrey, is a star athlete who messes up that stardom (and a lot of other things) due to his unresolved issues regarding his deceased father. He goes so far as to start using his mother’s maiden name, Duval. The middle brother, Charlie, is Maddy’s favorite; she claims he has “the gift of faith.” Charlie ping-pongs between delinquency and religiosity throughout his childhood, though he’s consistently friendless and conniving. The youngest is Zack. The secret about Zack is that he was adopted. The other secret about Zack—unknown even to Maddy—is that Zack is the love child of Jon and his co-worker at the bank. The ever beleaguered Maddy is a former artist forced to work two separate secretarial jobs in order to provide for her kids. She is finally pulling herself out of the spiral she fell into following her husband’s death. Then there’s Aunt Bel, Maddy’s outspoken older sister, who took the family in when they first arrived in Calgary. Bel and Maddy’s relationship has always been tempestuous. “I suppose Mama wouldn’t be herself without Bel flying in and out of her life on a broomstick, breaking Mama’s spirit and giving her a chronic case of nervous hysteria,” narrates Alice. “Still, family is family. When the chips were down, blood flowed to blood.” Together, this fractious unit must confront problems old and new, from Maddy’s return to dating and painting to the circumstances of Jon’s death and Zack’s parentage. In times of crisis, there’s always family…though that may not always be a good thing.
Tocher’s prose, in the mouth of Alice, is spry and unsparing; here she describes Aunt Bel’s indelicate impression of Alice’s grandmother’s sleeping sickness: “ ‘She looked like this.’ Bel stiffened her body and twisted it into a hideous shape. The newspaper slid to the floor. She screwed her jaw to one side and raised her arms up into air with her hands clawed as if they were about to attack. By the time she came out of her pose, I had fled in terror.” The novel, short at under 120 pages, is told in episodic chapters that tend to revolve around a single character or incident. The order isn’t chronological, but a portrait slowly emerges of the family and its dynamic. Alice provides a stable, sympathetic center to the narrative. A shrewd observer of the people around her, her quest to understand her father’s behavior and absence becomes an unexpected driving force in the book. The book’s brevity works in its favor. Tocher manages to pack a lot into her pages.
A slim but fulfilling novel in stories about the madness of families.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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