An often enjoyable but uneven mix of romance, domesticity, and action.
What starts as a typical self-empowerment novel about a family attempting to start a new life in Hawaii after tragedy takes some unexpected noirish turns midway through.
Two years after her husband Paul’s drowning in Oregon, Welsh-born Lindsey Hill moves with her three children to Hawaii, where she’s purchased a motel—sight unseen—with life insurance money that's finally been paid out after Paul's surfing death was ruled accidental. Still grieving Paul, Lindsey is also contending with the chaos his financial failures caused in the months before he died. Sloan writes about the entire family with energy, insight, and humor (like the physical comedy surrounding the aged Crown Victoria that Lindsey rents the first day, crashes before exiting the rental agency’s parking lot, and ends up buying). Of course the Mau Loa Motel turns out to be beautiful but more run-down than Lindsey expected; of course she is emotionally numb until a handsome stranger shows up and helps with repairs while stirring her heartstrings; of course 14-year-old Olivia has trouble adjusting to high school until she meets a boy and his brother, while 7-year-old animal lover Sena is uber-precocious and 12-year-old Carlos is a sensitive pleaser who covers his own pain while protecting the others. Slowly they start recovering in all the conventional ways before Sloan shifts gears to include elements of crime fiction. Unfortunately, the plotting, while less predictable than a standard domestic dramedy, becomes more stilted as the male characters, who never quite gel, take prominent roles. It turns out that the men in Lindsey’s life have not always been what they seem, a truth her children figure out before she does. A raging storm bearing down on the motel with everyone inside becomes the novel’s piece de resistance and raises the stakes for everyone involved, including readers, before a disappointingly easy denouement.
An often enjoyable but uneven mix of romance, domesticity, and action.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781250847300
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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