In Dainty’s debut novel set in the late 1950s, a 16-year-old girl grapples with personal loss in unimaginable conditions after her troubled, alcoholic mother forces her into a mental hospital.
After the tragic death of her sister and father in an accident in October 1957 (the day after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1), Gertrude “Gertie” MacLarsen is sent to Willow Estate Sanatorium. During Gertie’s stay, she faces her grief and her mother’s rejection, forms relationships with others, and eventually finds a sense of community under the most unlikely circumstances. At the same time, she witnesses horrors, including abuse, suicide, and rape, and notes the uneven power dynamics between the patients and hospital staff. But she also finds friendship, love, and a vision for the future away from her tragic past and broken family. Dainty’s descriptions of the treatment of mental health patients are alarming; several particularly disturbing scenes depict unethical therapies in detail. However, the author counters the dark content with poetic prose, as when Gertie notes that “My name...sounded like someone had taken a bag of smooth sounds and smashed it against the wall until nothing but edges remained.” The book also offers a well-developed, layered cast of characters with unique back stories, including Elizabeth Jacobsen, Gertie’s confidante who’s been at Willow Estate for more than five years; and Clement “Pope” Marshall, a young man with a stutter who becomes Gertie’s love interest. When Gertie realizes that everyone, from her fellow patients to the ward’s nurses, has a voice that should be heard, she creates a publication that circulates around the ward. After one issue featuring anonymous submissions falls into the wrong hands, Gertie’s journey shifts from survival to a fierce reclaiming of life. Although the concept of a teenage girl winding up in a mental hospital isn’t exactly new in YA, the specificity of this story’s time period enables the author to tackle it in a fresh way. Sputnik 1, for example, remains a symbolic anchor throughout the story, acting as Gertie’s greatest connection to her deceased father. Dainty successfully weaves in concepts of space exploration, stars, and the vastness of the universe, often using them as metaphors for her protagonist’s tribulations.
A beautifully written coming-of-age story from a promising author.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-945502-10-1
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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