Two tales of impassioned struggles that are often compelling, despite uneven prose.
A pair of character-driven stories from Leven.
In the first of the book’s two tales, “Mom and Apple Pie,” Laura Halprin is a young girl with family problems. Although she, her parents, and her grandmother live in a seemingly pleasant country setting, their home is beset with domestic turmoil, due mainly to mother Amelia’s alcoholism, which has been a problem for years, and even endangered her husband’s job as a lawyer. After their move to their new house, Amelia seems to get control of her behavior—but after a few months, she’s stumbling home drunk again, and her family is pessimistic about her ever changing her ways. In the second story, “Alliance of Affliction,” a New York City couple forms an odd bond. Lilly Stanton always wanted to be a dancer, and she worked hard toward this goal, training religiously and pushing her body to its limits. Now in her 20s, she finds herself in incessant pain. Along comes a young man named Peter Morgan,who’s also obsessed with physical prowess. He spends hours in the gym, and has pushed his body as far as it can go—and, despite his sculpted appearance, he’s also in agony. He and Lilly meet and discover their shared experience, but will they learn how to yield to their limitations? Both stories tell of people in grim circumstances, but they also offer inklings of hope that, for example, Amelia will kick the booze or Lilly will find a calling outside of dance; this not only keeps readers’ attention, but also allows the narratives to move at a quick pace. Several passages, however, earnestly express sentiments that are obvious from context, such as that Peter “couldn’t accept the fact that his body was deteriorating and rebelling…and at the young age of twenty-nine!” At another point, it’s noted that Amelia “reeked from the smell of booze, smoke, and vomit,” followed by the unnecessary statement that the “stench was horrendous.” Still, the main characters’ situations are engaging enough that readers will want to find out if they can manage to defeat their personal demons.
Two tales of impassioned struggles that are often compelling, despite uneven prose.Pub Date: April 23, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-67-235857-4
Page Count: 107
Publisher: KDP Amazon
Review Posted Online: April 7, 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
SEEN & HEARD
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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