A short, captivating tale of unwanted attention.
In this novel, a female graduate student becomes an object of desire.
The year is 1962. The young women who flock to the small New England town of North Chesterfield to attend Mt. Simmons College come mostly from well-to-do families—they live on monthly allowances, vacation in Europe, and date boys who go to Harvard and Yale. Mabel Gorne is everything they are not: Midwestern, mysterious, and shabby in a way that suggests disinterested old money. She’s come to Mt. Simmons to pursue graduate studies in anthropology, but she quickly acquires a collection of younger acolytes: “Mabel was ‘unique…special… singular,’ or ‘un symbole du raffinement’ to the Francophiles….Whether she understood the spell she cast or not, the fact remains that the spell was very real.” She boards in the grand Victorian home of respectable local couple Ruth and Henry Alston, who also swiftly grow enamored of her—particularly Henry, who spies on Mabel through a peephole in her bedroom wall. Mabel does have a few secrets, including those involving her nighttime trysts with local assistant constable Jim Flaherty. But it turns out that the unspoken desires of those around her may prove to have just as strong a pull on her destiny as anything in her past. Biddle’s stylish prose perfectly captures the mid-20th-century setting in all its repressed isolation: “Dressed in a nylon slip and nothing more, Mabel sat beside an open bedroom window in the Windsor Haven Hotel. A pair of sepia-patterned curtains shielded her from the road below and the passersby strolling Main Street….She experienced a sense of peril as compelling as any she’d known. It was like climbing the catwalk on a railroad bridge.” The sentences sing, and every creaky room of the Alston house becomes a stage for suspenseful encounters. It’s a compact story, leaping back and forth between a handful of rich interiorities, and readers will be delighted to journey with the characters into the darkness of their hidden lives.
A short, captivating tale of unwanted attention.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-6188607705
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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