This feels like a beautifully wrought short story extended into novel form.
A young woman tries to move on after a difficult breakup.
Penelope Lin, who grew up in Beijing, loves Philadelphia, the city she calls home. She’s passionate about her job at a museum, where she gets to research foot-binding practices and handle historical relics. Some good friends from college live nearby, and she has roommates she likes as well. By chance, she meets a young man she’s drawn to, but even as their connection deepens, she pines for another chance with her ex-boyfriend. It’s the fall of 2018, two years into the first Trump administration, and the midterm elections are coming up. Politics feel inescapable even for Penelope, who thinks of herself as apolitical. Partly because of her new love interest’s interests, she volunteers with a group of activists trying to unionize the workers of a popular hotel. Penelope and her close friends don’t always agree on politics or what they should be doing with their lives as they approach their mid-20s, but they share their points of view and grapple with choices around careers and dating. Penelope has the added complication of confronting, for the first time as an adult, aspects of her relationship with her parents she’d rather not face. The story is narrated by Penelope, and debut author Elegant writes long, rhythmic, fluid sentences. She and her protagonist are tuned into the five senses, making the book’s descriptive paragraphs a pleasure to read. Penelope loves history in general and Napoleon Bonaparte in particular, resulting in long passages related to the Napoleonic era, the history of Philadelphia, different Chinese dynasties, and more. In keeping with the tradition of coming-of-age novels, Penelope is nothing if not idiosyncratic, but the book plays it safe, focusing on small internal moments of reflection and questioning rather than conflict among characters or the consequences of actions taken or not taken.
This feels like a beautifully wrought short story extended into novel form.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781324086147
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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