A gripping, highly nostalgic dive into a decade and a high school sport.
A debut novel focuses on an athlete’s intense journey.
Sam Bagliarello is a 17-year-old student in Linden Grove, Illinois, in 1988. Sam’s life is severed into three timelines: his recent past climbing the social ladder at school and caddying at a golf club; his current recovery from the aftermath of a horrific car accident that leaves him dead for 51 seconds; and a year in the future when he is in the midst of the biggest race of his varsity track career. His quest for popularity in the first of these periods takes him to a house party where he drinks, embarrasses himself, and rides away on his bike, only to be struck by an errant driver at local landmark Spirit Hill. The battle to survive after severe injuries is long and hard, altering everything about Sam’s life. “It sounds like the easy road through senior year vanished with your bike. You’re going to have to get comfortable leaning on others for help even if you don’t like the idea,” his friend Sara tells him. With the help of his brother, Frank, a former high school football player who burned out in college, Sam takes up running and sets his sights on going to the state finals. Meanwhile, he still has to navigate his complicated connection with his family, his vision of his academic future, and the ins and out of high school relationships. Magluilo’s sports novel reads like a John Hughes movie that indulges in its love of the story’s setting, from the early Jane’s Addiction Sam listens to before races to Sara’s punk aesthetic. The book may appeal less to today’s teens and more to adults who grew up in the 1980s in that regard. Still, the author clearly did his research on track and field and is able to successfully convert this visual, fast-paced sport into vivid writing that will leave readers on the edges of their seats.
A gripping, highly nostalgic dive into a decade and a high school sport.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-1578691456
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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