An accomplished, touching debut featuring moving insights into the mind of a sensitive teenage boy.
A 14-year-old finds comfort in botany while dealing with his younger sister’s illness in this debut YA novel.
As he enters his home in Newcastle, England, teenager Oliver Campbell is shocked to discover his 5-year-old sister, Lily, convulsing as his mother looks on helplessly. When Lily must be hospitalized, it upends Oliver’s family, which includes his half brothers, Nathan and Sam. It also changes Oliver’s day-to-day existence, which was usually spent hanging out with his word-nerd pal, Kamal, and crushing on a girl named Poppy Teasdale. She’s a year above him in school and works in her family’s garden shop. There, she and tongue-tied Oliver “usually ended up with little bursts of coded plant-speak.” As the novel progresses, he faces protracted agony, as well as a brief reprieve, regarding Lily’s mysterious condition, and a sympathetic nurse shares news of his pain and plight in emails to her own elderly mother. On a school trip to the Tate art gallery in London, Oliver almost decides to run away, but he’s stopped by a sage homeless man. He also overcomes his shyness in order to practice and then perform the role of Laertes to Kamal’s Hamlet in the school play—a part that perhaps hits a bit too close to home. By novel’s end, Oliver comes to new understandings with his neglectful mother and the elusive Poppy, who’s away in Australia during much of his family’s crisis. Best of all, he has some flowers in his family’s garden to soothe his suffering and loss. Debut novelist Johnston takes readers on a rich emotional journey in this contemporary YA tale, which she tells mostly from Oliver’s first-person perspective. Through his musings, she masterfully conveys both the inner angst and deflective banter of a struggling adolescent boy, which is by turns humorous and heartbreaking. The novel’s botany motif is sometimes a bit overextended, as even the nurse has the middle name of “Dahlia.” Still, the author largely uses this device to compelling effect—most particularly when she reveals the flower name of Kamal, Oliver’s well-developed sidekick.
An accomplished, touching debut featuring moving insights into the mind of a sensitive teenage boy.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481914253
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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
The people in her books may screw up, but Hilderbrand always gets it right. Kind of amazing.
A dreamy Nantucket house party given by a meticulous hostess goes off the rails.
“When Hollis posts a potato and white cheddar tart with a crispy bacon crust, her foodie community breaks the one-million-member milestone. (Leave it to bacon!)” And leave it to Hilderbrand, in her 30th book of Nantucket-based fiction, to cook up more literary bacon, this time focusing on female friendship, female “friendship,” and the power of the internet and social media. When Hollis Shaw's doctor husband dies in a crash on the way to the airport, she steps back from Hungry With Hollis, her popular website. After moping around her house in “Swellesley” for a while, she returns to Nantucket for the summer, planning a kick-out-the-stops weekend party that will involve one girlfriend from each phase of her life—youth, college, motherhood—plus her favorite internet follower, an Atlanta-based airline pilot, whom she's never actually met. Two of these old pals are definitely not as close to Hollis as they once were, one of them has done her secret harm, and Hollis dramatically increases the potential for trouble by paying her angry 20-something daughter to document the weekend on film. Add two bottles each of Casa Dragones tequila, Triple 8 vodka, and Veuve Clicquot, plus some Hendricks gin and Mount Gay rum—what could possibly go wrong? Known for gently inserting social commentary into her plots, Hilderbrand here highlights the ridiculous fickleness of cancel culture when one of the characters—Dru-Ann, an extremely successful Black sports agent—almost loses her clients, her job, and her boyfriend when a video clip of a private conversation in a restaurant is posted on social media. Everyone says there's no way forward without a self-effacing apology. Dru-Ann says pass the Casa Dragones. Meanwhile, Hollis is about to learn that friendships forged on the internet are not always what they seem. Hilderbrand has announced plans to retire in 2024. Wait—that's next year! No!
The people in her books may screw up, but Hilderbrand always gets it right. Kind of amazing.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780316258777
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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