An original and captivating story that highlights the power of love and art.
In Pattern’s debut historical novel, a teenage boy flees the misery of his native village for Elizabethan London and finds both danger and a chance of renewal as a Shakespearean actor.
John runs away from home and from terrible abuse. He’s strikingly beautiful in appearance, and strangers repeatedly think that he’s a girl, and he sometimes seems to embrace this identity, although he identifies as a boy to others. John also sees a world that’s invisible to others—one populated by faeries and other creatures, including a hobgoblin who often accompanies him and appears to act as his protector. When he arrives in London, he quickly befriends Black Jack, a shiftless opportunist living in the margins of the city’s life. He sees John’s unusual beauty and innocence as a potential source of cash and secretly considers selling him into sexual enslavement. John trusts him, nonetheless, and leans on him to help him navigate the city he imagined as a magical refuge. He’s in search of a “Faerie Queene” who he believes will provide him with protection, but instead he discovers that England’s capital is a cold, frightening place. As he confesses to Black Jack: “London is not what I expected, dear friend. I thought it’d be faerie light, not more darkness and nightmares.” However, John eventually finds a sense of belonging in the theatre and starts to apprentice as an actor for William Shakespeare’s company at the Globe Theatre, training with his brother, Edmund.
Pattern’s tale is artfully bewildering; readers will likely be left a bit disoriented for much of the book, but they’ll also be immersed in its magnetic, offbeat nature. The protagonist’s sanity is often put into question as he seems to move from one fantastical realm to another—from the world of magical hallucination to one of creative imagination, from peculiar reverie to artistic drama—a shift that the author portrays with great subtlety and playfulness. Black Jack is just as complex a character, and Pattern chronicles Jack’s development without any lachrymose sentimentality; he’s shown to be a character fitfully and thoughtfully at odds with himself as his worldview becomes gradually changed. The city of London emerges as a messy and vertiginous combination of sheer possibility and relentless danger. Part of the nuance of the book is the ambiguity of Black Jack’s relation to John; it is often unclear if he is John’s protector or his enemy in a world full of perils that John has difficulty negotiating on his own. The interjection of Shakespeare into the plot at first seems like a gratuitous literary gimmick, but it turns out to be essential to the story, as the playwright’s own words are used to show how love and poetry can “transform the ordinary things that most people don’t even notice into things of terror and beauty.” Overall, this is a delightfully unusual novel that swings from the tender to the gruesome and back.
An original and captivating story that highlights the power of love and art.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-3949666025
Page Count: 241
Publisher: tRaum Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2022
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
SEEN & HEARD
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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