A set of captivating tales of strangers in a very strange land.
Russian immigrants in America ponder the meaning of life, navigate supernatural experiences, and search for lost treasure in Budman’s story cycle.
This collection centers on a man known only as “the interpreter of dreams and afflictions”—a semiretired, Russian-born Jewish engineer now living in Boston, where he works as an online medical interpreter for Russian-speaking patients. He and his unnamed wife, in their spare time, help care for their two young granddaughters. In these meandering stories, the interpreter recalls his family’s history in the Soviet Union, where they weathered persecution and exile; conveys gentle life lessons to his grandchildren; observes the medical melodramas of the patients; stages whimsical funerals for a goldfish and a tick; and, in the fraught title story, confronts a mass shooter at an immigrant community center. Some of his adventures are wondrous: He tries out a variety of eternal-youth potions but gets cold feet when he recalls how callow and selfish young people are; receives dream visitations from biblical patriarch Joseph, who dispenses terse advice; and hones his talent for floating up to the ceiling. Intertwined with his narrative is a subplot about Piotr Osipovich Voronin, a penniless Russian immigrant in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, who hopes to recover priceless pearls hidden in ornate pillows that his aunt mailed to America, and Penelopa Belkina, a strapping young woman from Odessa, Ukraine, who uses her computer- hacking skills to help Piotr locate the pillows—in return for a hefty cut of the loot. Their quests introduce them to oddball Americans, including someone with a fair-sized arsenal who also collects teddy-bear figurines and an unemployed woman enduring the purgatory of job-search seminars. Eventually, the quest leads to the interpreter’s doorstep—after he buys one of the fateful pillows.
Budman crafts a story collection that reads more like a novella, exploring coherent, resonant themes, such as the exhilaration that immigrants feel regarding America’s opportunities and their bafflement at its alienating culture; the deep changes in perspective wrought by aging; and the uncertainties of attempting to communicate with and understand other people. His fictional world has a Dostoevskian feel to it; its characters are steeped in metaphysical rumination and spiritual yearnings, which lead to material calculations and occasional eruptions of shocking violence. Full of mordant wit, colorful characters, and disorienting swerves, Budman’s text brims with evocative detail when relating squalid realism—“He spent his fiftieth birthday the night before cursing his fate in heavily accented English, drinking stale Diet Coke mixed with a few drops of leftover vodka, munching on his last Triscuit,”—and bizarrely matter-of-fact magical realism: “The Green Man stands alone on the sidewalk of a new housing development where every house is at least half a million in Earth money….His eyes are undiluted anthracite with speckles of white. His skin is poison-green, the color that makes you think of an industrial spill.” The result is a dazzling read with true philosophical depth amid wild flights of fancy.
A set of captivating tales of strangers in a very strange land.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2022
ISBN: 9781604893342
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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