A quirky fairy tale with a vibrantly realized setting and a wonderfully outrageous twist.
A woman comes of age in Fifth-Floor Dresses at San Francisco’s upscale I. Magnin department store in the 1980s.
There are a lot of things 19-year-old Zippy has never done: She’s never been to a school dance or on a date, never been told she’s pretty, had a real boyfriend, or had sex; and, until she met her current roommate, Raquel, never had a best friend, tried alcohol, or taken a cab. She’s never eaten an artichoke or been to Seattle or Sonoma; she’s never met her father or even known his name—she’s the product of a one-night stand and grew up in a tiny apartment over a liquor store, sleeping in the hallway after her mom married a man named Howard. Though no one has ever noticed Zippy’s obvious intelligence or suggested she apply to college, there is one area where this naïve people-pleaser shines, and that is selling clothes. The highlight of Blau’s latest is the vivid department store setting, from the Adrienne Vittadini and Bill Blass dresses to the individual saleswomen, the hold tags, the complaint cards. Those pesky complaint cards! Despite Zippy’s tireless work and top-selling status, there have been a flood of cards claiming she’s pushy and bossy, that she forces bras and shoes on customers, that people are afraid to return clothes while she’s there. How can such a smart girl not immediately realize these must have been fabricated by a jealous colleague? Well, the other thing is that Zippy is profoundly insecure. Her low self-esteem is focused in particular on her appearance and her body, and this drives a subplot about dieting and weight loss. Though this coming-of-age story is not as edgy as some of the author’s earlier work, it still has plenty of unusual sex talk—a penis “so lumpy” it looks like “a miniature sack of kittens”; much discussion of holes, smells, and fluids; a venereal disease rumored to cause “fuzzy buttons” on a man’s testicles. AIDS, too, plays a role, though not an unduly serious one, in Zippy’s journey toward filling some of the gaps in her life.
A quirky fairy tale with a vibrantly realized setting and a wonderfully outrageous twist.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780063052352
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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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