A fictional family tale that flows like a biography narrated with energy and optimism.
In this novel, a rebellious teen conducts soul-searching with the help of her great-grandmother’s diary.
Seventeen-year-old Delia Elliot of Rochester, New York, has ended her junior year of high school with her social life in shambles. After Greg Ashworth, her ex-boyfriend, shared private photographs of her with their classmates, Delia began a run of delinquent behavior. Now she’s been fired from her restaurant job and her mom, Heather, has decided to make her clean the attic of their dilapidated family home. In the midst of this task, Delia finds the diary of her great-grandmother Didi Diamond, dating from 1932. The teen reads about life during the Depression and Didi’s courtship with a young man called Paul. Delia is immediately stirred by the mystery of Paul’s presence since her great-grandfather’s name was Ron. Meanwhile, Heather feels invisible and craves a midlife boost in both her romantic situation and career. It doesn’t help that her ex-husband, Johnston, is happily remarried. She turns to Brian Napier, an occasional fling with whom she’s afraid to get too serious, for extra courage. Seeing progress with the attic, Heather loosens Delia’s house arrest. The teen begins falling for her neighbor Jake Freimuth, who’s nothing like the abusive Greg. As the rift between Delia and Heather starts to heal, with help from Didi’s diary, the pair feel ready to face anything. Barker knows this is the perfect moment to upend her characters’ lives. For the opening two-thirds of the dynamic story, chapters narrated by Delia and Heather alternate, with portions of Didi’s diary included. Events proceed loosely, and those of greatest import are interior to the mother’s and daughter’s lives. Heather decides to take on the challenge of becoming a real estate agent, for example. When Delia learns that her mother had a troubled childhood and spent time in foster homes, she realizes that Heather is “separate and distinct from me” and “lived an entire life before I came along.” When tragedy strikes toward the engaging novel’s end, the author toys with readers’ expectations since real life sometimes doesn’t provide closure. Ultimately, the tender finale will comfort audiences.
A fictional family tale that flows like a biography narrated with energy and optimism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73535-811-6
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2021
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
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