A fast-paced tale of being young in Europe that is frenetic, detailed, and enjoyable.
A South African man embarks on a backpacking trip across Europe with a French companion, working various menial jobs, in this debut novel.
Brian is in his early 20s and has been dazzled by friends’ stories of adventures while traveling in Europe and wants to give it a try himself. After saving up for a year, he leaves his native Durban and heads to Germany. There, he gets a job schlepping customers to an overpriced clothing store on an American military base. He meets a group of guys and has some fun, but it is not long before the police falsely suspect him and a friend of drug dealing. Unfortunately, Brian’s visa expired and he forgot to renew it. Ordered to leave Germany immediately, he ends up at the home of his father’s business associate in Austria and spends time at the family’s beautiful farmhouse. Traveling again, Brian is short on cash and can only hitchhike, but at a grape-picking job in France, he meets a gorgeous young woman named Monick. There is an instant attraction, and they decide to trek across Europe together. They need to work, but the jobs are always undesirable and difficult. They pass through Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, and Greece, very much in lust but often struggling through setbacks, grateful for the generous souls who help them along the way. Walsh’s engaging story of a dream trip to Europe is very smoothly written and full of wonder and upheaval. The locations range from the obvious to the obscure and are described with colorful details that show a great knowledge of the places and their oftentimes kindhearted inhabitants. Brian transforms into a spontaneous and industrious character, but the novel never gives up its frantic pace. The lack of an overall plot apart from the traveling makes the ending seem a bit arbitrary.
A fast-paced tale of being young in Europe that is frenetic, detailed, and enjoyable.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4808-9348-1
Page Count: 308
Publisher: ArchwayPublishing
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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