An immersive novel of friendship and transcendent phenomena.
A woman attempts to cure her friend of frequent trips to the other side in Shearer’s debut novel.
Loretta Sparkman is going through a midlife crisis—or, as she prefers to describe it, turning into a zombie—due in part, perhaps, to her husband Matthias’ ongoing struggle with cancer. She’s also just reunited with her best friend, Jenny Black, who has come to stay with the Sparkmans after five years of absence from their lives. The first thing Jenny wants to talk about is near-death experiences. “Not having a bad scare or thinking you might die,” Jenny clarifies. “The other thing. When you go through a tunnel, float above your body, see dead relatives, your life flashes before you.” Loretta has never had one. Jenny has had 22. In the past year. They come to her out of the blue, whisking Jenny to a netherworld where she can communicate with the spirits of people who have already died. Why are they happening? What does it mean? Jenny wants Loretta, who works as a spokesperson for a university, to ask around the faculty and see if anyone might know something about NDEs. Loretta will do what she can, though a university scandal involving race and artificial insemination is taking up most of her time. Can the two old friends figure out just what these NDEs mean before Jenny gets trapped on the wrong side of death for good? Shearer’s prose has a lively precision, toggling between humor and urgency as needed. Here, one of Jenny’s episodes occurs in a lab: “Jenny nods, her body begins to go limp. Loretta rushes forward, grabs her beneath her arms and half-drags, half-pulls her to the machine. ‘It’s happening, now, it’s happening!’ she yells. The director is shouting, ‘Roll tape, run sound, places everyone, the event is coming, now! Go!’ ” The novel is as interested in the meaning of near-death experiences as the characters are, and the book as a whole serves as a rumination on the nature of life, birth, and death. While the plot sometimes dawdles, it’s an engaging, enjoyable story of attempting to find the right balance—at least while on this side of the grave.
An immersive novel of friendship and transcendent phenomena.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73451-974-7
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Pumpjack Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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