Authentic military details aren’t enough to deliver an emotional impact.
A troubled Army veteran joins the Navy as a medical corpsman after 9/11, which threatens the already fragile state of his young family.
Ed Brannan has PTSD from his Army service in Somalia. He has a violent temper, which leads to trouble at work and home. But after 9/11, he knows what he has to do to become himself again. He re-enlists, this time in the Navy, becoming a medical corpsman in a casualty evacuation unit. He marries his girlfriend, Jenny, and moves her and their two kids to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. After his training, he is deployed to Iraq for several months. His confidence and diligence earn him a promotion. Back in the U.S., however, his volatility surfaces; tensions develop in his marriage. A second deployment leads to another promotion. His career picks up. Back again, he becomes an instructor at the Field Medical Service School, a job that will keep him stateside. His relationship with Jenny and the kids improves. They buy a house and start going to church; their lives stabilize. Then he “volunteers” for an assignment in Afghanistan, which is even deadlier than Iraq. Using his own name for his main character, first-time author Brannan writes from personal experience, and the military detail is as convincing as it gets. The effort, however, to depict military personnel navigating career and family life falls short. Readers are told much but shown little. Few scenes immerse readers in the characters’ emotional turbulence. Brannan leans too much on third-person narration, which gets quite repetitive, and there is little coherent sense of building toward the climax. Too many of the military scenes are jargon-laden and static, adding detail but little else.
Authentic military details aren’t enough to deliver an emotional impact.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499121841
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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