An entertaining, thought-provoking spin on rebooting the mind and heart while in quarantine.
A collection of five vignettes portrays life in the age of Covid-19 quarantines.
In the spring of 2020, arts journalist Stewart, befuddled by the pandemic raging across the globe, laughed “at life’s new absurdities.” As a creative outlet, she began writing humorous tales starring quarantined strangers forced to interact with one another and to ultimately learn more about themselves through the “complexities offered by chaos.” The vignettes imagine a time in August 2020 when a second viral mutation emerges and the government distributes permanently locking bracelets to detect and track the infection. The Forget-Me-Not dive bar is the location for the first story, featuring a discreet regular whose bracelet flashes red and blurts out official warnings. The patrons and staff proceed to drink and become acquainted for their mandatory six-week quarantine. Elsewhere, the situation repeats at the Golden Pin-Up Salon, a gossipy, small-town beauty parlor where the beaming bracelets strike terror in the hearts of a feuding housewife and a distressed colorist. The same bright red beacons flash for other strangers who unexpectedly find themselves quarantining together at a rural Missouri dentist office, a Southern California BMW dealership, and the conference room of a prominent attorney. Once introduced, the heartwarming, character-driven tales progress through short chapter snippets. The cross-section of locales sets the scene for a diverse assortment of characters varying in age, race, and gender—and from all walks of life—who personify differing political persuasions, faiths, and perspectives on life and love. The author leaves no person unaffected or plotline dangling, as all of her players recognize, even if fleetingly, the power of human kindness and self-love. As she demonstrated in her advice book about possessions for parents with millennial children, No Thanks Mom (2017), Stewart exhibits a lust for life and parlays the lessons she’s learned throughout her travels into the engaging storylines of this cornucopia of worthy and addictive characters—with cute line drawings by Brallier included. Amusing and immediately relevant, the collection creates a world mired in uncertainty and turmoil but also a place where people can learn from others and become surprised by their capacity for change.
An entertaining, thought-provoking spin on rebooting the mind and heart while in quarantine.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9981025-5-9
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Flandricka House Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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