An intensely readable fictional study of three people under stress.
An unexpected tragedy adversely affects the lives of three women in Peppe’s debut novel.
It’s an ordinary, sunny day in 2015 on Night Orchid Drive in Naples, Florida, when sudden tragedy strikes. A dog dashes out into the street, and 60-year-old retired lawyer Jim Franza is hit by an automobile and killed as he dashes out after his pet: “The thud was ear shattering as the man bounced off the car’s fender and was thrown to the ground.” As is the way with such tragedies, its effects ripple outward, radically altering the courses of several lives. After a long and happy marriage, Franza’s widow, Ivy, immediately envisions how her future will unfold: “The dream years are over,” she says to herself, “and now the nightmare begins.” Her best friend, Marge Coppola, notes to her own husband that “It’s going to take some time for us to adjust to not having him in our lives.” This proves true not only for Ivy and Marge, but also for their neighbor Elena Pineda; she’d been chasing the man in the car, who’d stolen money from her. Readers meet these three women, all in the prime of their lives and surrounded by fellow neighborhood residents, and as the novel’s time frame moves on, the trio changes as a result of the loss they all share. Ivy, who’s 62 years old, is initially remarkably healthy for her age (“Good genes combined with Ivy’s mission to maintain the illusion of youth worked magic”), but this changes as she descends into alcohol abuse. Elena, stung by Ivy’s increasingly vicious accusations that she’s responsible for her husband’s death, becomes a near recluse, and Marge becomes increasingly frustrated that she can’t seem to reach either of them.
Over the course of the novel, Peppe lays out all of these events with careful skill and an abundance of dialogue that alternately reveals and conceals. The novel offers a portrait of a wounding tragedy in a seemingly tranquil suburban locale, and Peppe exploits the inherent tensions that result with an understated skill that’s reminiscent of the works of Jacqueline Susann and Raymond Chandler, by turns. She manages to convey Elena’s pain, Marge’s confusion, and, especially, Ivy’s escalating emotional deterioration in sharp detail: “Mrs. Franza, have you been drinking?” a physical therapist asks her at one point, and Peppe notes that the therapist’s “nose twitched, as if she could discern not only the brand of Chardonnay, but [its] year and bottler.” None of the characters in this novel are simple and straightforward; indeed, Ivy, Elena, and Marge all have a refreshing complexity that invites readers to become more invested in them as the story goes on. A major plot twist in the book’s second half feels a bit mechanical, and the text contains a distracting number of typos, which would have been avoided with a stronger copy edit. Despite these flaws, however, the author works her way to a mature and unusually satisfying conclusion.
An intensely readable fictional study of three people under stress.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5439-9512-1
Page Count: 342
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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