An original, often stirring story of unlikely friends attempting to find a bit of justice.
A prep school loner and an angry townie team up to solve a teenage girl’s murder in this debut novel.
In 1962, Alexander “Xander” Gadeski is a freshman at Saint Francis Minor Seminary and Prep School, where he was recently raped by someone, though he does not know who. While cutting through the local cemetery not long after the attack, he meets a local girl, Phaedra Cooper, who is half Seneca, holding vigil over one of the graves. She has promised to avenge her friend Pretty Flower. The girl’s death was ruled a suicide but Phaedra is convinced she was murdered. In fact, Phaedra thinks the killers are students at Saint Francis. “Pretty came to me in a dream,” she explains. “She told me, ‘Look to Saint Francis to solve my puzzle.’ My people don’t take dream visitations lightly. I’ve seen the cruelty behind the eyes of Francis boys. Evil shows itself to the patient watcher.” Xander is alarmed by Phaedra’s intensity, but he can’t help but notice that Pretty Flower died on the same day as his own father. Plus, Phaedra insists that Xander is something called “Skagedi”—an anagram of his last name—though she won’t explain exactly what the label means or where it comes from. Even so, Xander agrees to join forces with Phaedra to discover the murderers. Perhaps Phaedra can help Xander exact his own revenge. Drisgula’s prose manages to be both conversational and moody, creating an appropriately Gothic atmosphere for this often intense novel. At one point, Xander narrates: “I assisted Brother Rose…Brother was protecting me. What he thought he was protecting me from we never discussed. Something had gone terribly wrong with my introduction to Saint Francis, and he was trying to shield me from further harm.” Xander and Phaedra are intricately traumatized, and the girl’s idiosyncrasies allow her to outshine some of the trope-ier aspects of her character. The meeting of ’60s Roman Catholic prep school culture with the lives of Native American townies makes for an intriguing contrast. Readers will be reminded, in a good way, of the novels of Robert Cormier.
An original, often stirring story of unlikely friends attempting to find a bit of justice.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64544-237-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: March 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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