An intriguing but uneven dive into the profit-driven environment of modern medicine.
A novel focuses on an internecine battle among five women seeking to climb the medical corporate ladder.
This quintet flies in weekly to various hospitals for the corporation EMRC, coming together to encrypt medical records and to teach doctors and nurses how to do the same with the goal of maximizing profits. Brea Foster is an abused woman who is her family’s primary breadwinner. Kate Parks is a pill-popping pretty young thing who can never please her mother. Reese Holland is a faded Southern belle and an alcoholic. Her White racist background makes her contemptuous of the team’s two Black members, Madeline Warren and Anne Walter. Madeline is in a marriage of convenience, with both spouses taking lovers. On her way to ruling this roost is the aging Anne, a physician’s wife who knows how to play the game. They all deal with a dog-eat-dog world, with each trying to climb over the other in stiletto heels. Ethics fly out the window in the name of higher insurance reimbursements, malpractice be damned. As Anne’s star rises, the others seek to imitate her traits, both procedural and physical, in hopes of improving their own chances of advancement. But all along, Anne has been playing a Machiavellian long game, and the rest are in danger of getting broken down and spit out by EMRC if they can’t keep pace with the shifting rules of engagement. This caustic cautionary tale offers a thought-provoking premise, diverse characters, a clear window into a dark world, and plenty of intrigue. The story also addresses the serious and timely issue of abuse. But the novel reads much longer than its 191 pages. Being set in the esoteric world of health records and information doesn’t help, especially since how that field works remains murky despite the tale’s elaborate details. Smith’s stance appears to be that the Hippocratic Oath is an anachronism since the health care business doesn’t really worry about patients’ well-being. While this seems increasingly true, few will want to read about the proponents of such a practice. There are no sympathetic characters here, leaving no one the audience can root for. It’s difficult to care about five women who are missing moral centers. Many readers will wish for a pox on all their houses by the book’s end.
An intriguing but uneven dive into the profit-driven environment of modern medicine.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 191
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2021
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 phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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