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EARLY SOBRIETIES

Wry, sharp, charming, resistant to neat closures and easy turns—a debut of enormous promise.

The witty, fiercely intelligent story of a young alcoholic in the fragile early days of sobriety, suspended between addiction and whatever life might come next—the shape of which he can’t yet see.

Twenty-six-year-old Dennis Monk, just months sober, gets the boot from his parents’ suburban Philadelphia home and begins what will be, over the novel’s episodic chapters, a half-year odyssey as the serial houseguest of relatives, old flames, and running buddies from high school and college. Dennis jumps from makeshift situation to awkward makeshift situation (pushed-together couches he hopes won’t get sold out from under him, cots in basements alongside washing machines) all over a rapidly gentrifying Philadelphia filled with his only-marginally-less-lost peers. Sometimes he’s a freeloader; sometimes he earns his keep, sort of, through errands not always handled successfully, projects he can fake his way through, or fitful employment. Dennis is nimble-tongued and keenly observant, and the book offers all sorts of humorous delights. Yet the reader quickly sees, too, that irony is Dennis’ protective coloration, that his wit is anxious and self-preserving. He may not be a gentrifier, but he is a kind of hipster who, like his coevals, simply wants to cobble together, from the unpromising materials available, an identity he can live in. Beneath the world weariness and sarcasm we get glimpses (for instance, in the bit-by-bit-revealed story of a friend who died from drinking) of a sweetness and vulnerability, even a fragile hopefulness, that Dennis is at pains to hide and resist. This is less a traditional novel than a linked collection of stories, a serial picaresque, but ultimately that approach feels like the right one for a book about navigating—or maybe just drifting through, in search of some useful piece of flotsam to grab hold of—a limbo of one’s own making. As a starting point for a new life, “non-drinker” is a necessary condition...but by itself that datum doesn’t get one very far. The book ends with Dennis, one year sober, on the verge of—well, who knows what, but verges beat sloughs every day.

Wry, sharp, charming, resistant to neat closures and easy turns—a debut of enormous promise.

Pub Date: May 7, 2024

ISBN: 9781662602245

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Astra House

Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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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

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THE NIGHTINGALE

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

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