An imperfect but revealing novel of gay life in the 1940s and ’50s.
A gay man comes of age in midcentury Chicago in Hanssen-Adams’ novel.
It’s 1946, and 14-year-old Nick Hansen is waiting for the train downtown. His planned purchases that day include an issue of Men’s Health, featuring pictures of male bodybuilders—an indication of his nascent attraction to men. During his wait, he accepts a lift from a 30-ish man named Stan, who takes him to the woods and makes sexual advances. Stan soon begins picking up Nick from school, threatening the teen with blackmail, and eventually raping him. When Nick seeks help from his teachers, they bizarrely blame him for bringing the incident on himself. “I had no friends that I could turn to about something like this…I sat there thinking about what Stan had just said and about what he had done to me….Was I queer, which was the word that he had used?” In high school, Nick meets a few like-minded boys and has sex with a Marine named Doug, but his experience with Stan continues to haunt him as he navigates his sexual identity and the murky world of hookup culture. Eventually, he graduates from high school, finds a job, and even becomes a curious man’s first male sexual partner. Unfortunately for Nick, that man, Allan Miller, is murdered shortly afterward, leading police to suspect that Nick is involved in the killing. Suddenly, the life that Nick has been at pains to keep secret is in danger of being revealed, and he could possibly end up in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
Hanssen-Adams makes it clear that this is a work of fiction, but it’s one that he says is partially inspired by events from his own life. The book’s shape and tone are highly memoiristic, laying out the happenings in Nick’s life in a chronological and episodic manner. A great deal of information is simply reported rather than dramatized in scenes, and the prose has the vague, reflective quality of a diary entry: “We spent a good part of that first day on the beach, which we had pretty much to ourselves. And I have to say that this was the best beach that I had ever seen. It seemed to go on forever, the sand was very fine and there were no rocks or anything else that you had to avoid stepping on.” The book’s greatest strength is in how it depicts aspects of gay life at a time when gay sex was treated as a criminal act and when others’ discovery of one’s sexual orientation could completely undo a person’s life. The interactions between different men—some of whom know what they want and some of whom do not—are a source of great dramatic tension that’s sometimes uplifting, sometimes disturbing, and other times a combination of both. Those looking for a full, novelistic treatment will be disappointed, but readers who are content to enjoy a slice of life from an earlier era will find much of value here.
An imperfect but revealing novel of gay life in the 1940s and ’50s.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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