A realistic, compassionate look at a family in crisis struggling toward individual growth and purpose.
A horse could be the salvation of a desperate man and his troubled son in this novel.
Body shop employee Dean Hostler’s impulse to buy a filly at a horse auction as a birthday gift for his 16-year-old son, Ricky, is one screw-up too many. His naïve winning bid of “16” means that he is contracted to pay $16,000 for the horse, not $1,600. His family’s trailer home is seized in lieu of payment, and his adored wife, Lorraine, leaves him. She loves the dreamer in Dean but not his disconnect from the reality of their lives—money worries and Ricky’s attention deficit disorder. That the horse, named Orphan, will be the catalyst to change the lives of Dean and Ricky is evident from the get-go. Dean is drawn to her as “something ancient and incorruptible,” and she becomes Ricky’s world. But this tale, set in the 1980s, is written with too much gritty compassion for its flawed characters to turn into a trite, upbeat horse story. Keegan, whose books include the YA novel Clearwater Summer (1994) and the adult novel A Good Divorce (2003), brings nuance to the emotionally charged challenges his players face as they strive to find themselves. Alternating third-person narratives reveal Dean’s and Lorraine’s perspectives of each other, Ricky, the painful family histories that shaped them, their differing hopes for the future, and her potentially devastating secret. These relatable narratives are effectively interspersed with Ricky’s troubled, first-person observations of his parents, the new people in their lives (including horsewoman Jill Sprague, who has her own demons but gives Dean and Orphan a safe harbor), and the teen’s condition. Ricky’s disorder worsens when his mother is courted by a manipulative man, Dean’s one-time best friend from high school. Movingly, Ricky’s condition is integral to the profound, healing bond that he forms with Orphan. Throughout, the vivid milieu of horses, riders, and the “backside” of racing, where Dean feels at home with an eclectic mix of “people like himself who didn’t fit in anywhere else,” is informed by the depth of Keegan’s firsthand experience.
A realistic, compassionate look at a family in crisis struggling toward individual growth and purpose.Pub Date: June 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63-901466-8
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Global Summit House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
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