A brutal, visceral, and vivid story told in an unforgettable voice.
What to do when the grotesque is the norm in your family, your surroundings, your life? Make art out of it.
An enigmatic young Argentinian woman with a quirky command of language, Yuna Riglos narrates Venturini’s bizarre and mordant tale of misogyny and misunderstanding. She and her sister, Betina, are being raised by a strict schoolteacher mother whose husband left the household years earlier. Yuna and Betina are both considered disabled, although Yuna’s difficulties are more subtle and fluid than her sister’s multiple physical and emotional disabilities (some of which lead to unfortunate physical manifestations). Yuna’s aunt—her mother’s sister, Nené—has two girls as well, one of whom was born with a type of dwarfism. Yuna’s challenges (beyond those presented by her distressing environment) involve a lack of facility with language; for example, punctuation exhausts her, and she consults a dictionary constantly (with sometimes-comedic results) in order to record her thoughts on the events of her life. The only factor in Yuna’s favor is her extraordinary talent as a painter, which allows her to convey the brutal realities of life around her and also rid herself of the “mess” in her head. Yuna and her cousins suffer a variety of assaults, crimes, and indignities at the hands and genitals of the men in their orbit, with varying degrees of damage done. Yuna’s instinctive and underinformed efforts to create a more tolerable life for herself result in what may be considered growth but might not be considered success. Venturini was 85 years old and had produced more than 40 novels by the time she won an Argentinian literary prize for this work in 2007. It’s now been translated from Spanish to English, for the first time, by Maude.
A brutal, visceral, and vivid story told in an unforgettable voice.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781593767297
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
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