A compassionate, nonjudgmental look at the difficult decisions that pregnant women face every day.
Rasmussen’s novel follows the courses of two pregnancies, each marked by trepidation, heartbreak, acceptance, and joy.
For Rachel, a 30-year-old kindergarten teacher in Los Angeles, a baby can’t come fast enough. She and her husband, Brett, have been trying for years, but when Rachel finally finds herself pregnant, the news ushers in a host of concerns: When to tell her parents? How to decorate the nursery? And the worst question a pregnant woman can ask herself: What if something is wrong with the baby? With compassion and warmth, the author sheds light on the physical and emotional roller coaster a pregnant woman experiences and the ways in which a pregnancy—whether it’s planned or not—upends one’s life. Alternating chapters tell the story of Katie, a 32-year-old single woman who becomes pregnant after a chance encounter with a former classmate. Raised in a dysfunctional household, Katie has serious concerns about raising a child alone, especially after she learns that her baby has a 1 in 3 chance of being born with Down syndrome. A devout Catholic, Katie seeks support from her church even as her circumstances force her to consider an abortion. After Rachel also learns of a threat to her fetus’s health, the two women meet in a support group and form a deep bond. The novel suffers from a few strained plot turns, such as Katie’s belated attempt to uncover her ancestral history, but its true heart is the friendship between Rachel and Katie, a connection that affirms the importance of chosen family. The author endows her characters with an endless capacity for light banter. In a novel that concerns miscarriages, abortions, fetuses with life-threatening conditions, and families cracking under pressure, this buoyant sense of humor sometimes feels jarring, but it does brighten up the mood, as in a tender scene between Rachel and Brett: “I think you should leave me and find someone who can give you a baby. What about Martha from the dry cleaner?” Brett responds, “You will never get rid of me; I love you too much….Besides, if things didn’t work out with Martha, I’d have to find another dry cleaner.”
A compassionate, nonjudgmental look at the difficult decisions that pregnant women face every day.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781956851601
Page Count: 324
Publisher: TouchPoint Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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