by Barbara de la Cuesta ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 29, 2015
An artistic stream-of-consciousness novel of health care workers and their patients in 1980s Massachusetts.
Health aides and residents of an assisted living facility deal with challenges while a space shuttle makes its first orbit.
In this historical novel, de la Cuesta (On the River This Morning, 2014) follows several health aides and patients at an assisted living facility in the Boston suburb of Waltham in 1981. The book’s first section is narrated primarily by Priscilla, who traces her family’s prominent local roots as she commutes to her job cleaning up the incontinent elderly. Interspersed throughout Priscilla’s section are updates from the space shuttle Columbia, making its first trip to space (“A hundred and seventy miles above the Earth, Columbia passes over gypsum sands, the Tularosa Basin. Young and Crippen sleep”), which provides a counterpoint to the dramas of patients Wolfie, Alcide Arsenault, Adie, and Megan. In the second section, patient Henrietta Rose tells stories of confronting her alcoholism and her many years spent overseas (“She recalls the dinners that she used to hostess…Henrietta’s extravaganzas, people called them, there on that plateau of Sogamoso…dusky little wives of her husband’s underling engineers…the waiters in and out with appetizers, children underfoot in nighties…barman, who had had a few himself just after midnight”). The final section of the book is narrated by Priscilla’s colleague Rosa Mundo, whose relationship with Wolfie is more than professional, and who tells the story of a health care workers’ strike that challenges the characters to balance self-interest, community goals, and altruism. De la Cuesta is at her strongest in building the book’s setting, painting a vivid portrait of 1981 Waltham that demonstrates how little the city has changed in three decades (“She skirts the Common with its warm lights and reassuring bus passengers at the south end, and goes straight up Moody without her morning detour over the little footbridge by the Mill”), and renders the Charles River a character of as much importance in Priscilla’s life as her children are. But the book’s stream-of-consciousness style and the author’s decision to present dialogue without quotation marks or other tags (“I so proud of you, Rosa says. I never hear of a teacher like that./I love her, Esmeralda says. All the girls love her”) makes for challenging and often tedious reading, amplified by the book’s excessive length.
An artistic stream-of-consciousness novel of health care workers and their patients in 1980s Massachusetts.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 372
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
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Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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