An amiable debut tracks a group of Vietnam veterans through the 20 troubled years of peace that follow their return. Disturbed Vietnam vets unable to adjust to peacetime life have become so clichÇd that, as characters, they are nearly incapable of supporting a story on their own, but Gologorsky concentrates as much of her attention on folks back home as on the grunts themselves. The story revolves, somewhat elliptically, around Rod Devins, Rooster Barodin, and Frankie Bowers, three friends from New York who all served in the war together and came back to the city when their stints were up. Rooster marries Millie Reid, and the two have a daughter, Sara-Jo, before they break up. Rod marries Emma Hanson, and they have two daughters, Beth and Laurie. Frankie and Ida Connors date for a long time but never marry. Rod has trouble holding work, and he and his family eventually lose their house in the Bronx. Millie has just as much trouble with Rooster, which is why she throws him out and works as a beautician to raise Sara-Jo on her own. Frankie never really settles down at all, and eventually he decides to go back to Vietnam to see what has changed in the past two decades. We also learn about Sara-Jo’s troubles with her boyfriend Serge, Millie’s sister Lucy, who has an affair with Frankie’s homeless friend Sean, and the unhappy marriage of Ida’s brother Jason to Deede Cassidy. If it all sounds somewhat like a soap opera, it is—though most of the dialogue is hard-boiled enough (—Trackman, where they going to write your name? We—ve been falling down dead for twenty-five years. No walls for us—) to have been lifted from James M. Cain, and the atmosphere overall is bleaker than the Bronx. Rambling and a bit unfocussed, but nicely drawn all the same: Gologorsky’s portrait of urban despair is low-key and avoids the worst stereotypes of the genre.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50201-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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