A powerful story of personal failure and reinvention.
Guida’s novel chronicles one man’s journey from failure to redemption as a cop in mid-20th-century New York.
When readers meet Alfie Baliato, the central character of this poignant, powerful novel, it’s 1968. He and his fellow New York City police officers are charged with ending the student antiwar protests at Columbia University—a task that many cops see as an opportunity to inflict pain on those they see as pot-smoking, overprivileged hippie college kids. Mixed with the white cops’ anger is intense racism and a lurking fear of the well-armed Black Panthers, who are part of the protests. As Alfie watches his colleagues use brute force against unarmed college students, he has second thoughts about the life he’s chosen; when he’s badly injured in the line of duty, his life is suddenly altered. In the pages that follow, readers effectively come to understand that the sources of Alfie’s doubts result from a life marred by traumatic experiences, shattered dreams, and disastrous choices. As a child in upstate Rome, New York, he witnessed terrible racial violence in which his father and a Black minister friend were horrifically beaten. Later, the Baliatos move closer to their extended family in an Italian American section of Brooklyn, and Alfie’s love for his first cousin Adeline, his unfulfilled dreams of a music career, and his indifferent marriage drive him toward a cynical, resigned view of life: “It had taken Alfie a long time to see what his father had always seemed to know and accept. Nobody was free.” However, the most powerful aspect of this novel is the author’s insistence that no one’s life is beyond redemption and that change is always possible, even if dreams never fully translate into reality. Set mostly in Brooklyn during the 1950s and ’60s, the book vividly renders the daily life and values of a particular urban community, and the characters feel real throughout. Readers will gladly travel with Alfie through the sometimes-devastating but always interesting moments of his life.
A powerful story of personal failure and reinvention.Pub Date: March 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781771838818
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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