A sprawling, cleverly imagined spoof of political culture and the miscreants it spawns.
A satirical skewering of the machinations of a despicable fictional American president.
Vermont-based author Manning exhibits a well-honed sense of the absurd in a silly but humorously absorbing debut. Wilhelm “Hick” Richter is the current American president, a double-chinned, Trump-esque, coke-snorting scoundrel his 13-year-old son, Billy, describes as “mean as a gutter rat” with a dyed comb-over and nefarious ties to corrupt international entities. Disgruntled with his young wife, Savanna, and their newborn baby, Richter continues to maintain nefarious ties to corrupt international entities while Georgina, one of his daughters, runs his sketchy companies. Cody, another daughter, snoops around and uncovers her father’s corruption and alerts the FBI. She is kidnapped and drugged by someone hoping to make her accept her father’s innocence by, among other things, forgetting some incriminating evidence surrounding her mother’s death. Cody’s brother Billy, who himself has bugged the Oval Office, is determined to swoop in, save her, and have his father implicated. Add to the cast Richter’s chief of staff Baron “Bugsy” Knowles and a host of unscrupulous druggy hoodlums, and you’ve got a serpentine stew of dirty politics. There’s also the smart, young Jeremy Green, who plans to hijack Richter’s reelection plans with his own campaign. Richter enters into a deal with a Russian ambassador named Boris to reveal secrets about a robotic prototype in exchange for help securing his reelection. Cody narrowly escapes her captors and goes on the run, while Richter’s legions of “Hick Brigades” crisscross the nation inciting violence and discord in honor of their philandering leader. Manning lays the head-spinningly satirical groundwork for all of these eerily familiar antics with the ease of a seasoned comedian. If it all sounds insanely zany, it is, yet Manning’s imagination, ambitious plotting, and comic timing are impeccable, and the outright corruption is hilarious. The hijinks steamroll common sense toward the conclusion, when the parade of bumbling idiots makes one final plan to dispose of poor abused Cody. This is a brilliantly conceived parody.
A sprawling, cleverly imagined spoof of political culture and the miscreants it spawns.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Encircle Publications
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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