A successful set of tales of appealing peculiarity.
In de Valera’s linked short story collection, a cop and his goofy friends grow older in coastal Australia.
Narcotics agent Michael O’Neill is getting a bit old to still be going undercover, but he lives for his job. When his superiors send him to Australia’s rural Northern Rivers region to bust a heroin dealer known as God, he heads for the hippie-inhabited hinterland—a popular spot for drug users and dropouts ever since the Nimbin Aquarius Festival popularized the area in 1973— accompanied by his crystal-elephant–collecting girlfriend, Azure, and his colleague Baby Johnson, who suffers from PTSD and likes to read stories about Conan the Barbarian. After a successful bust, the crew decides to stay in the area, where they meet an assortment of countercultural characters that help keep life interesting: Star, a single mother with a checkered romantic history who grows and sells marijuana in order to buy a wood stove; an eccentric, mentally ill man named David and his on-again, off-again wife, Doreen, who recently quit a Christian cult; and later, God, aka Lawson, who acclimates to civilian life after a seven-year stint in prison—at least until he starts to lose his sight. The collection spans the 1970s through the 2010s and beyond, painting a portrait of Australia’s hippie generation as it ages. De Valera’s prose is fresh and surprising, as here in a 2002-set story about Lawson: “On the day he planned to kill himself, the day he’d decided had the best chance of success, he rose at six as usual.” The stories are all slice-of-life pieces, but they’re far from predictable, lurching forward and backward in time and between different characters’ perspectives. (The final chapter, “Another Lifetime,” takes place in 2137 and features future incarnations of Michael and Azure.) It’s such an unexpected assortment of genres—crime stories, drug tales, SF—that it can’t help but circumvent readers’ expectations. It makes for a great beach read, whether on the coast of New South Wales or the other side of the world.
A successful set of tales of appealing peculiarity.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9942745-2-6
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Old Tiger Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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