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CLEAN SWEEP

A bleak but engaging tale that deftly spotlights a serious issue in America.

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A retiree devotes herself to helping people living on New York City’s streets in this debut novel.

After selling her successful advertising firm, Carli Morris retires as an independently wealthy woman. She spent three decades committed to work, and now she wants to “give back.” She starts by helping deliver food and clothing to the homeless and volunteering at a soup kitchen. This leads to a much more arduous program—Mobile Outreach. Carli joins a man named Grant in tracking down and checking on homeless people and aiding them whenever possible. Some folks living on the streets are upbeat and personable while others are hard to reach. But one of Carli’s most difficult cases is Grant himself. His work with the homeless has proved invaluable, but Grant sometimes appears out of sorts, perhaps indicative of substance abuse, mental turmoil, or both. He moreover reminds Carli of Henry, her older brother, who vanished 40 years ago along with the cult he was involved with. Carli’s efforts to help Grant and the street people may alleviate her pain over losing her brother. Lee’s story is unsurprisingly grim. Carli befriends street people who die, get sick, or reveal an unsavory side of themselves. The tale is also absorbing and convincing, as some of the homeless resist offers of assistance and must hide from “Sweepers”—police forcing them to move. The sights and sounds of New York City are showcased in the author’s taut, descriptive prose featuring Carli: “People passed, lights changed, and cars moved and honked, but they all seemed distant, even though they were barely feet away. She spotted Sarah clucking at pigeons and ignoring the rest of the world around her.” Though searing melodrama takes center stage, some intriguing mysteries quietly lurk in the background, from certain characters’ pasts to Grant’s theory that someone is lethally poisoning homeless people.

A bleak but engaging tale that deftly spotlights a serious issue in America.

Pub Date: July 20, 2021

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 378

Publisher: Little Brown Dog Press

Review Posted Online: May 24, 2021

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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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

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JAMES

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

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