by Francesca Segal ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2024
A summery read packed tight with quirky characters and their ongoing foibles.
A young veterinarian travels to a distant island to study tortoises and finds more than she’d bargained for.
In her latest novel, Segal has whipped together a fictional island, Tuga, “the size of an English county,” that is its own “miniature world, a British Overseas Territory…founded on the principles of compassionate collectivism by a series of deliberate arrivals, terrible calamities and happy accidents.” The book starts with a young research veterinarian, Charlotte Walker, sailing from London to Tuga for a fellowship to study the endangered gold coin tortoises native to the island. She gets off to a rocky start: There’s overwhelming seasickness, for one thing, and, for another, the handsome young doctor she meets on the ship turns out to be not quite as available as he’d first presented himself. But once Charlotte gets used to the “bugs and creepy crawlies and biting things, and the terrifying isolation and claustrophobia when all around the sea roiled and there was no way on or off, just water and sky and the purgatorial emptiness of that unbroken horizon,” she quickly finds herself falling in love with both the island and its inhabitants. As a reader, it’s hard to resist falling in love right alongside Charlotte. Instead of driving, island residents get around by catching a ride on a donkey; there’s also a single taxi driven by a man who calls himself “Taxi,” who also serves as the only radio announcer. Then there’s a pair of prepubescent best friends, Annie and Alex, who run roughshod over the island and whose devotion to each other is sweetly moving. Charlotte soon finds herself enmeshed in much more than she’d bargained for—including the mystery of her own paternity. If the book has any flaws, it’s that not every character has been fully fleshed out—some of the more minor personalities can seem a bit flat. But the primary joy of this delicious book is still in getting to know the island’s peculiar characters, whom Segal treats with a gentle, quirky sort of amusement.
A summery read packed tight with quirky characters and their ongoing foibles.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780063360457
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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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
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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