by Jan English Leary ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2023
An engrossing story that reveals how small-town lives can have big complications.
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Leary’s novel examines the unpredictable costs of keeping secrets.
In the small, rural college town of Shelton, Pennsylvania, young peoples’ possibilities are determined by cliques: “In the Venn Diagram of Shelton (PA) High School, three groups intersect: faculty children, townies, and farmers.” As a farm kid, Wanda MacDonald is accustomed to being at the bottom of this social construct. She’s smart and dreams of becoming a nurse, but she instead marries her longtime boyfriend, David Zacek, a proverbial dumb jock. When David gets laid off from his factory job, he enlists in the Army without consulting Wanda and is killed by an IED when he is deployed near Baghdad. Lost in her grief, Wanda conceives a child with local misfit Whit Sutter and gives birth to a boy she names Macky, telling everyone the baby is David’s. Being a professor’s daughter doesn’t prevent Callie Morton, another Shelton girl, from making bad choices: While attending the local Brewster College, she falls for Greg Minot, a French professor 10 years her senior, and they run away together, a decision she will regret. Callie and Wanda eventually become unlikely friends as the author constructs a moving narrative about the impact of secrets: They truly need each other, discovering that confession is good for their souls and learning that they must admit and work past their mistakes if they are to move ahead with their lives. Leary's long experience as a teacher shines through as she reflects on how the educational system treats those from varying backgrounds in quite different ways. The novel’s structure, alternating between Wanda’s and Callie’s stories, proves effective, as the reader gets to see how both women flounder and then mature.
An engrossing story that reveals how small-town lives can have big complications.Pub Date: May 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781953236852
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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New York Times Bestseller
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 Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Best Books Of 2015
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National Book Award Finalist
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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