An intriguing but uneven tale about a boisterous gang of shipmates.
A nostalgic debut novel chronicles the alcohol-fueled hijinks of a Navy man in his early 20s.
Bittick’s tale is a look back at a moment in a man’s life when he is “too old to be a kid and too young to be considered an adult.” The author’s narrator, Bosner, is a 21-year-old aviation maintenance worker in the Navy stationed far from home. His life boils down to working long hours fixing helicopters in the hangar, trying to make it to a local bar before last call, and then collapsing in the barracks before waking up and repeating the cycle. The best part of Bosner’s life—besides his beat-up jalopy, the Green Beater—is the camaraderie he shares with his gang of shipmates. When two of his friends, B-man and Dolvar, decide to move into a house with another shipmate and his wife, Bosner wonders whether two “consummate partiers” will be good roommates for a married couple. But he dismisses his concerns because of what the house will provide for the gang: a place to party away from the barracks. Bosner then describes three weekends of epic parties at the Cape Henry House, featuring falls on black ice, drunken sprints through neighbors’ yards, fights, beer pong, romance, and karaoke. After the gang discovers that some of its members will soon be sent abroad to support a ship’s deployment (and the married couple tell the hard-partying roommates to move out), the group throws one final Super Bowl Sunday blowout to bid the house farewell. Bittick clearly understands the nuances of Navy life, and his descriptions of barracks living and work in the hangars are vivid and captivating. Unfortunately, the tale focuses on the gang’s bashes at the Cape Henry House. Drunken fights and keg stands are neither interesting nor funny when the characters involved are as thinly drawn as the members of Bosner’s gang, who are basically interchangeable. The most fully developed players besides Bosner wisely do not spend much time at the Cape Henry House parties. The story suggests that it’s more fun to attend bashes than read about them.
An intriguing but uneven tale about a boisterous gang of shipmates.Pub Date: April 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73703-090-4
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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