An enjoyable South Pacific tale, both smart and unpretentious, about leaving home and starting over.
A British mariner changes careers and moves to Tahiti to work as a data scientist and manager of aid programs in this novel.
William Greenwood is divorced and in his early 40s when he decides that his maritime career may be ending. After a bout of dengue in Tahiti, he is impressed with the medical research apparatus, and he heads back to school to become a data scientist. Several years later, he bids farewell to England to work as a research assistant for a dengue project in Tahiti. Though he knows the sea, he has only a cursory familiarity with life on the Pacific islands. Now, reconnecting with Serge, a French doctor who helped him years before, William is immersed in the island’s warm and friendly environment and leisurely pace. When a scientist named Ingrid Olson visits from Norway, William notices that “an ineffable joy swept through me; my forty-seven-year-old self instantly felt young and free and renewed as though ready for a date.” William and Ingrid do become intimate, but she eventually returns to Europe. As William accepts other jobs in Tuvalu and Fiji, he tries to keep in touch with her, but the future is uncertain. His work involves grueling travel, but soon he will have to confront matters in his personal life back home unless he wants loneliness to become the norm. Thompson’s globe-trotting novel reads like a memoir, complete with photographs by the author, and has a fine focus on the real-world pains and pleasures that make the story so convincing. The knowledge about different islands, governments, cultures, and aid programs is top-notch, but it is the tale of being over 40 and afraid that work will overwhelm the last clinging threads of a personal life that shines through. This is a relatable but sophisticated book, and the protagonist’s search for love in middle age, plus a surprise at the end, makes it a moving one.
An enjoyable South Pacific tale, both smart and unpretentious, about leaving home and starting over.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-4237-3322-3
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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