Some interesting ideas don’t mesh well with a whole lot of melodrama.
Summers in Puglia forge fraught bonds between a privileged girl from Turin and three local boys in a through-the-years saga jam-packed with events.
Bern, Nicola, and Tommaso live on the farm adjacent to Teresa's grandmother’s home, and Teresa is fascinated by the trio from the instant she spots them taking an illicit nighttime swim in her grandmother’s pool when she's 14. By the time she’s 17, she and Bern are lovers, which arouses Nicola’s and particularly Tommaso’s jealousy. Bern’s devotion to Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees none-too-subtly flags him as given to extremes, and as the novel flashes forward to 2012, Tommaso’s drunken revelations to 32-year-old Teresa reveal that the boys’ bond was closer and weirder than she ever knew. Then we’re whisked back to 2003, when Teresa inherits her grandmother’s estate, which includes the farm where Bern, Tommaso, and some new friends—Nicola glaringly not among them—are now squatting. Still fixated on Bern, Teresa joins their commune devoted to sustainable living and guerrilla activism in defense of the environment. Incident piles on top of incident: The commune breaks up; Teresa and Bern have trouble conceiving a child and decide to get married to raise money for infertility treatments; those don’t work, so she sets Bern free by pretending she’s been unfaithful. What all this has to do with the insistently reiterated theme of Bern’s yearning for absolutes is murky—until Tommaso’s confession resumes, and readers learn what drove Bern to the act that results in his fleeing Italy. His final meeting with Teresa has touching moments, muffled by the extreme improbability of the circumstances. Grappling with material similar to Richard Powers’ masterful The Overstory (2018), Giordano gets bogged down in plot and fails to persuasively convey his characters’ ideological passions. Bern remains an enigma, as does Teresa’s devotion to him.
Some interesting ideas don’t mesh well with a whole lot of melodrama.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984877-31-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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