An uneven collection from an exciting young author.
The author of Days of Distraction (2020) explores timeless themes in short fiction.
Unemployed after being replaced by a piece of software, a woman in her 30s is burning through her severance pay, spending her days eating weed gummies and binge-watching dating shows. When a former co-worker steers a housesitting gig her way, she finds the idea of an “escape into someone else’s house, someone else’s life” attractive. This job takes her to a secluded home in the hills owned by a couple embarking on a trip to Portugal. Our narrator is free to enjoy the home’s amenities—meditation room, swimming pool, Peloton, professional espresso machine—as long as she agrees to stay out of the wife’s painting studio and a dilapidated shed. Despite the contemporary details, this is a perfect setup for a gothic tale, and Chang delivers a story in which the unexplained takes on the power to chill because of how it occurs within the quotidian abnormality of extreme privilege. This story, “Unknown by Unknown,” is the first in the collection, and it is far and away the best. The title story is also very good. In it, a series of rituals meant to honor ancestors forces a young girl to reckon with a massacre that occurred long before she was born—a massacre that her now-dead grandfather had tried to make her understand. The rest of the stories presented here are substantially less satisfying. Chang’s debut novel was brilliantly executed. Most of the works we see here feel like warm-up exercises or not entirely successful experiments. The author seems to have a particular aversion to—or difficulty with—endings. The openness at the end of “Unknown by Unknown” feels both scary and weirdly thrilling. Elsewhere, though, stories end at a moment that is maybe supposed to seem portentous but comes across as arbitrary.
An uneven collection from an exciting young author.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780062951847
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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