An ambitious but erratic portrayal of a society gone wrong with no resolution in sight.
In the midst of a potential social revolution, a husband and wife on the downside of a bad marriage find themselves at odds.
Here we find a perhaps-prescient tale of murder and deceit set during a political upheaval in the near-future United States. There are hints of events to come, with drone deliveries and social uprisings as well as a critical plot involving the potential passing of a bill authorizing a universal basic income for all Americans. The two critical players are Michael Mixner, a Wall Street trader fallen dangerously into debt, and his wife, Wendy, a marketing guru soldiering on despite PTSD from a recent stillbirth. This marriage between a drug-addled former hip-hop artist–turned-trader and an anxiety-ridden marketing whiz is crumbling, but so is the community around them. The pivotal event comes when Michael’s best friend, a wealthy gay activist named Ricky, is shot to death after violent protestors interrupt the party of some wealthy elites. It’s not a mystery—Wilson calls out the killer in plain sight but wraps the drama in a web of familial deceit, societal dismay, and economic inequality that renders no one innocent. The nexus is Michael’s plot to get rich via a scheme involving a cryptocurrency in a virtual reality game that just happens to be the brainchild of his wife’s new client. Wendy has been hired to launch a stealth campaign dubbed Project Pinky, designed to derail the UBI bill. The narrative is dripping with drama, not least due to Wendy’s unapologetic seizure of her own fate in the wake of Michael’s recklessness. Wilson creates a deft juxtaposition of contemporary American classes on par with Richard Price's Lush Life, but whether readers approach it as a flawed crime drama or a satire of American inequality, they may find that implausible plot threads and unanswered questions leave them dissatisfied with the experience.
An ambitious but erratic portrayal of a society gone wrong with no resolution in sight.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64129-165-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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