The trajectory of Gray's flawed but relatable characters offers hope that even deep, long-festering wounds can heal.
A Black family in suburban Detroit is torn apart by long-held secrets.
In her sophomore novel, following The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls (2019), Gray again braids the narrative perspectives of three family members—here Daniel Ozro Armstead Jr.; his wife, Deborah; and his daughter, Trinity. Trinity narrates the opening section of the book, which is set at her father's funeral—though they are burying an empty casket because her father vanished years earlier and his death is only presumed. From there, the sections move back and forth in time to illuminate the situation and its aftermath, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Oz, as he was called, grew up in rural Alabama, but after a fire took his father's life and burned their house to the ground in 1962, his mother, Pearl, took her two sons and fled to Detroit. Both boys have mysterious scars and keep the full story of what happened from everyone, including the beautiful up-and-coming singer Deborah, whom Oz meets at a rent party. So much hope and promise are vested in Deborah’s career, and in the life she and Oz create for Trinity—but her recording contract never materializes, she turns to alcohol, and their home in an all-White-except-for-them suburb becomes a tense and unhappy place. Gray keeps the narrative interest high by teasing out the mystery of Oz’s disappearance as the family splinters and the story follows them to Chicago, New York, and back to the rural South. Oz, the most complicated character, retains a core of decency even as his mistakes pile up, and Trinity is a snappy smart-mouth—“I, on the other hand, looked like an aging hooker who’d had a particularly bad night”—who injects the story with energy and moments of comic relief.
The trajectory of Gray's flawed but relatable characters offers hope that even deep, long-festering wounds can heal.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781984802460
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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