An often intriguing but somewhat directionless tale about aging and art.
Two art school lovers go their separate ways to lead divergent—and convergent—creative lives in this literary novel.
Sandy Shellborn and Jeff Sanders meet at an art school in Boston in 1980. Sandy is a punk woman who turns heads for her bold fashion choices, but she has her doubts as to whether or not she will ever be a real artist. Jeff is a visionary who doesn’t follow the rules, his confidence in his own abilities never wavering. After a final, dispiriting evaluation, Sandy decides to walk away from art and pursue a graduate degree in library sciences. Her relationship with Jeff doesn’t last long following this decision. As Sandy tolerates a sensible career with a more sensible man, Jeff dives into the art world—which turns out to not always be quite as romantic or dignified as he imagined. (One early experience involves playing roadie on his much older girlfriend’s artist tour selling “Yoni Chalices.”) Over the next quarter of a century, Sandy and Jeff lead parallel lives, skipping between jobs and relationships, always in the same places and often around the same people. As they drift perpetually toward and away from art in its many forms, their mirrored paths prove that life is long, strange, and completely impossible to predict. Polo’s prose is smooth and descriptive, keeping readers grounded despite the novel’s nomadic drift between geographic settings: “A salty Virgin Island breeze played over his face and ruffled his pony tail as Jeff leaned against the rail of the magnificent sailing ship Mandalay and looked back at the coast of Virgin Gorda. The luminescent Caribbean Sea, full moon, and tropic isle looked exactly like the ad for this Windjammer Singles Cruise.” The concept is a fun one, and it will be rewarding for readers to see how the two protagonists grow over the course of the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s. While the chapters are generally compelling on their own, the book lacks a central tension or conflict that will pull readers forward. It won’t be long before the audience will begin to wonder what exactly it’s all building toward, and the answer—when it finally comes—doesn’t quite justify the journey.
An often intriguing but somewhat directionless tale about aging and art.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73466-225-2
Page Count: 321
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 20, 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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