An exceptional plot and characters make this historical novel a keeper.
The award-winning McFadden tells a tale of grave robbery, the Underground Railroad, and more in a historical novel set in Western Pennsylvania.
It’s 1857 in Hartsgrove, Pennsylvania, and four doctors and a druggist exhume—“resurrect” in the parlance of the era—the body of recently deceased Black man Fudge Van Pelt in order to further their studies in anatomy. This is illegal, and things heat up when a skinned corpse turns up. Another eerie grave-digging episode involves Dr. William Darling, mentored by the old Dr. Cyrus Vasbinder, and two of the co-conspirators who dug up Van Pelt. Will is an earnest young man, and when his patient, little Molly Plotner, goes from near death to robust health and then, supposedly, to death, Will is flummoxed. He and his friends hope to dig up Molly’s body to see if an autopsy will yield answers, but they find an empty coffin. Against this backdrop, the plot goes galloping off, with a dramatic trial, a jail escape, the blossoming of love between Will and the spirited Kathleen O’Hanlon, and a tragic Underground Railroad escapade. The conclusion is both shocking and weirdly believable and satisfying, as befits an author who has earned multiple honors for his work, which was included in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021. Memorable characters include the kindly but compromised Dr. Cyrus Vasbinder; the bloviating politician Levi Smathers; Henry Westerman, a free Black man known as Black Hen; and the mysterious Augustus Hamilton, who claims to be free but may or may not be. The tremulous desire of old Black Hen for the widow Van Pelt is deeply touching. A wonderful writer, McFadden has a poet’s way with words: “Fudge wore his worry like a necktie”; “[Will] was a free man, shackled to his fears”; “a sleep of refuge more than restoration.” His thoroughly engrossing book seamlessly weaves humor and sadness, wit and tragedy, fear and love.
An exceptional plot and characters make this historical novel a keeper.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-7984-7481-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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