A wrenching and sharply observed novel of unconventional love and family tragedy in 20th-century New England.
A novel about love and yearning in small-town Vermont.
“Blood is blood,” one character darkly intones in Nolan’s taut, evocative novel, and this phrase haunts the events of the story that unfolds in Branlee Village, in Vermont’s Caledonia County in the mid-20th century. Branlee is a tiny place, centered on a town meeting hall, a post office, and the Branlee Country Store (“It smelled like creosote and strong coffee from the outside and, every morning, it smelled like bacon and eggs and strong coffee from the inside”) and surrounded by small-hold farms. The store is owned and run by Bunny Farrow, who narrates the tale from a point many years in the future. Bunny married Stephen Hart when she was young, but after he was killed in World War II, she chose not to remarry and instead established a romantic relationship with a woman named Nicole in Montreal. During Bunny’s many visits to the city, she and Nicole are slightly freer to show affection in public that they would be in Bunny’s hometown. As the story goes on, readers also meet two young cousins from Branlee: shy, bookish Rebecca and pretty Diane, who relishes the attention of men at the Leroux Roller Rink and its attached dance hall. After Rebecca is seduced by loutish James Letourneau (who radiates a “greasy, self-satisfied malevolence”) and dies after giving birth to a son, Henri, in 1956, Bunny defiantly insists that she raise the baby herself. That’s when James notes that blood is blood and that someday he’ll collect his offspring. After that day comes, Bunny spends the rest of the novel worrying about Henri from a distance.
“Do you know the suspended, tingling fear you feel after a flash of lightening [sic] rends the heavens in a summer’s storm?” Bunny asks at one point. “You know a roll of thunder will follow in one explosive, earth-shattering instant.” This same sense of foreboding hangs over Nolan’s setting—a small town that’s “the kind of place a girl moves away from, not the other way around.” Throughout, Nolan effectively evokes a gritty, genuine Vermont (not the picture-postcard version that “the tourism folks like to sell”), and his novel’s portrait of how Bunny’s six years of mothering little Henri fills her with joy is so touching that readers will likely wish it were longer. James is a one-dimensional, monstrous villain, but Bunny is well-developed and complicated, as is the depiction of her life as a lesbian in 1950s Vermont and Canada. As a character, she anchors the book well, and the author wisely has the reader share her agony at not knowing what’s happening to Henri on the Letourneau farm; there’s a persistent dread that James’ noxious rages will attach to Henri like a curse. The book’s multilayered final acts give readers more views of Henri as a young man, but Nolan respects his readers enough to avoid any pat conclusions.
A wrenching and sharply observed novel of unconventional love and family tragedy in 20th-century New England.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2020
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
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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