A potent, vigorous coming-of-age tale featuring themes of identity, sexual liberation, and introspection.
A Canadian man wrestles with his family heritage and his adult life as a gay man in this debut novel.
Ned Baldwin, the lead character in Scott’s dynamic story, has graduated from Trinity, the Canadian college where he’s spent the last half-decade unraveling the mysteries of English literature, his future, and varying aspects of himself. With his college years behind him, Ned swiftly moves to London to get out from under his family’s thumb. It’s the mid-1980s, and he knows there’s work to do on himself, particularly accepting his sexuality in positive terms since he has self-loathingly admitted: “I wake up and it’s the first thing I think of, the last thing before I go to bed, that I’m this…faggot. That I’ll always be this faggot.” At a post-graduation “last supper,” he comes out to his best friend, Daniel. The scene is stiff and subdued, but nothing compares to Ned’s ordeal of revealing his sexuality to his upper-crust parents right after a car accident. Though London is enticing to Ned, it also harbors the potential to be lonely. Luckily, his bohemian aunt Cordelia is nearby, as is a wide rainbow of gay nightclubs and drag shows Ned ventures into. As he spreads his wings in the urban playground, he starts to fully acknowledge his gay feelings and separate himself from his privileged youth growing up in the stiflingly conservative and religiously pious confines of a wealthy family. He instantly embraces the city’s eccentric artist culture, an environment affording him numerous opportunities for diverse friendships and, as with the seductive Italian Luca, a first chance at sex and love. But Ned’s new life isn’t without darkness; a suicide attempt and the specter of AIDS hang over his yearlong exploration of London.
Scott is a clever writer, luxuriating in the meticulous details of his characters and elaborating on the wisps of gossip overheard at dinner parties. While maintaining the book’s brisk pacing and solid focus on its compelling protagonist, the author allows Ned to share the narrative stage with other characters who will draw readers in with their great impact on the hero’s life and future. Ned’s mother, Helena, is portrayed as a confidante who loves her son but remains at odds with his life choices, and his father, Oliver, just wants better things for him, the kind not found in the gay community in London. Ned is also haunted by the voice of an internal saboteur who “sometimes adopted his mother’s arguments, but gave them its own nasty twist.” Fond references to the works of Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, and others lend the narrative an acute sense of literary sophistication. Ultimately, Scott’s novel paints a vivid portrait of a man riding the first big wave of self-awareness based not on the legends of those tortured souls of the past but on the thrilling potential of what lies ahead. Readers of any sexual orientation will find Ned’s voyage of discovery a vibrant reminder of life’s multicolored bounty.
A potent, vigorous coming-of-age tale featuring themes of identity, sexual liberation, and introspection.Pub Date: July 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77751-399-3
Page Count: 259
Publisher: AOS Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
