A creative double-edged, historically inspired debut.
Newspaper columnist Di Ionno offers a multifaceted debut novel about a journalist at odds with whether to educate or exploit his audience.
In the last month of 1999, a young, unnamed reporter yearns to write the capstone clincher sure to close out the century with a bang. In a nursing home, he meets nonagenarian Fred Haines, a retired journalist who formerly covered the New Jersey beat and has enough secrets to make him the ideal subject for an article. The tale unfolds as the narrator reads Haines’ manuscript, a chronicle of his life. Haines tells the reporter about how he began his career as an idealistic young reporter but became a “tabloid guy” whose behavior and lack of ethics made him partly responsible for the proliferation of yellow journalism in the 1920s and ’30s. He compromised himself with stunts like snapping photos of murderer Ruth Brown Snyder’s electric chair execution and slandering influential rival newspaperman Walter Winchell, which ended up relegating him to writing flashy tabloid news pieces for the lowbrow Daily Mirror. On a routine assignment, Haines stumbled upon the biggest story of his career: the 1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping, its gruesome aftermath and subsequent investigation, which affected his life and livelihood. Brilliantly interwoven throughout the novel are revelatory associations—between the sage old man and the inquisitive younger one—about how sensationalistic journalism continues to influence the industry today. Haines remarks that, as news people, “We spread the crimes and tragedies but ignore the better side of humanity.” Di Ionno’s love of his home state of New Jersey is evident not only through the nonfiction he’s published and his columns for the Star-Ledger, but in this first novel which impressively merges fact and fiction into a resonant story of morality and meaning.
A creative double-edged, historically inspired debut.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0937548745
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Plexus Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.
In 16th-century Madrid, a crypto-Jew with a talent for casting spells tries to steer clear of the Inquisition.
Luzia Cotado, a scullion and an orphan, has secrets to keep: “It was a game she and her mother had played, saying one thing and thinking another, the bits and pieces of Hebrew handed down like chipped plates.” Also handed down are “refranes”—proverbs—in “not quite Spanish, just as Luzia was not quite Spanish.” When Luzia sings the refranes, they take on power. “Aboltar cazal, aboltar mazal” (“A change of scene, a change of fortune”) can mend a torn gown or turn burnt bread into a perfect loaf; “Quien no risica, no rosica” (“Whoever doesn’t laugh, doesn’t bloom”) can summon a riot of foliage in the depths of winter. The Inquisition hangs over the story like Chekhov’s famous gun on the wall. When Luzia’s employer catches her using magic, the ambitions of both mistress and servant catapult her into fame and danger. A new, even more ambitious patron instructs his supernatural servant, Guillén Santángel, to train Luzia for a magical contest. Santángel, not Luzia, is the familiar of the title; he has been tricked into trading his freedom and luck to his master’s family in exchange for something he no longer craves but can’t give up. The novel comes up against an issue common in fantasy fiction: Why don’t the characters just use their magic to solve all their problems? Bardugo has clearly given it some thought, but her solutions aren’t quite convincing, especially toward the end of the book. These small faults would be harder to forgive if she weren’t such a beautiful writer. Part fairy tale, part political thriller, part romance, the novel unfolds like a winter tree bursting into unnatural bloom in response to one of Luzia’s refranes, as she and Santángel learn about power, trust, betrayal, and love.
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781250884251
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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