An engaging story of love, grief, and remoteness on Martha’s Vineyard.
In Braley’s debut novel, a nurse gets a transfer in an attempt to build a new life for herself.
Tired of the drudgery of working in a Boston hospital, 27-year-old Georgette transfers to a facility on wealthy Martha’s Vineyard. She was last there a decade earlier, when she visited the island for the weekend with her alcoholic father.As the population dwindles in the off-season, Georgette takes a full-time job taking care of Mr. S, a famous novelist in declining health with a bad temper. One of his symptoms is the inability to grasp things with his dominant hand: “Pens, papers, anything would slide out,” narrates Georgette. “He referred to it as a claw and told me once he felt this was a punishment of some sort.” The two form an unexpected friendship, and Mr. S’s attempts to come to terms with his approaching mortality force Georgette to confront some of her own unresolved traumas. She also meets the mysterious Dock, a good Samaritan who saves her from an aggressive, inebriated man at a bar; she finds herself drawn to Dock, even though she’s generally wary of trusting people. Can Georgette ever really find a place for herself on Martha’s Vineyard, where the line between islander and outsider seems uncrossable? Braley’s prose effectively captures the sound and texture of both the island and its people—sometimes in the same passage, as when Georgette describes Dock’s showing up at her door in the middle of the night: “I listened to the ocean waves breaking at the pillars under the club’s dock, and thunder shuddered off in the distance. He was soaked and looked thin and tired. The club lights came on, and he squinted, tucking his chin into his jacket.” Overall, the story builds slowly, mapping the patterns of Georgette’s life over more than one timeline and sketching intriguingly damaged characters. Although the work occasionally engages in melodrama, it is, for the most part, a compelling and psychologically satisfying tale of one woman’s complicated history.
An engaging story of love, grief, and remoteness on Martha’s Vineyard.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 371
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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