This historical novel’s strong point is finding the grit behind the glamour of the Rockettes.
An engaging story set in 1950s Manhattan focuses on Radio City Music Hall and its performers.
It’s 1956, and Marion Brooks thinks she’s satisfied with her life. She lives comfortably with her businessman dad and her older sister, Judy, in Bronxville, she has a fiance who’s suitable (even if she doesn’t feel all that excited about marrying him), and she has a job teaching her true passion: dancing. It’s not like having a dance career herself, but with her overprotective and overbearing father, it’s as close as she’s likely to get. Then she gets fired. Dad advises her to start planning her wedding, but then by chance she hears about an open audition for the Rockettes, the iconic dancers of Radio City Music Hall. She goes on a lark, but when she’s offered the job, she’s dazzled—so much so that she upends her life, taking it in stride even when she’s kicked out of the family home. Living amid the merry chaos of the Rehearsal Club, a Manhattan boardinghouse for women in the performing arts, she welcomes the grueling training dancers undergo, then relishes the four-shows-a-day performance schedule. She even finds time to party and, in spite of her newfound independence, is intrigued by Peter Griggs, a psychiatrist interested in what would come to be called criminal profiling. But New York City isn’t all bright lights; for an astounding two decades, someone called the Big Apple Bomber has been setting off explosives in public places without being caught. He’s bombed Radio City twice—and when he does it again, Marion will have to grapple with far more shocking changes to her life. The novel is rich with historical details, and it comes most vividly to life in the passages about the Rockettes, with all the sweat, agony, and camaraderie that go into those miraculously perfect performances.
This historical novel’s strong point is finding the grit behind the glamour of the Rockettes.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780593184042
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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