An atmospheric tale that deftly captures the leisure and egos of its expensive spa setting.
A group of frustrated women tries to savor a luxury spa with an uncertain future in this debut novel.
For the past 25 years, Nadia Demidova has been the director of Lavender Lane in Palm Springs, California, one of the world’s most exclusive spas. She likes to observe her guests arriving from behind the two-way mirror in her office—she can always pick out the difficult ones. The clients for the current 10-day session may be just that: Mavis Perkins, an ex-model married to one of the wealthiest men in Chicago; Charlotte Tanner, an overweight Texas housewife accompanied by her sex-curious teenage daughter, Lauren; Toni Etheridge, a former fashion buyer; and Dr. Eleanor Franklin, the CEO of a nutritional company who is hiding out after a plastic surgery gone awry. The session gets off to a rocky start, but with the help of her assistant director, Phoebe Bancroft, Nadia soon has the clients making friends and swapping sob stories over healthy dinners and relaxing beautification treatments. Then Nadia dies suddenly of a heart attack, and the spa’s future is up in the air. Phoebe hopes that she can run it herself, but when Nadia’s handsome and eligible son, Peter Culvane, arrives, the competition begins to see who can snag the bachelor—and the spa along with him. Melhado’s prose is smooth and sybaritic, giving one the sense of reading a novel set inside a series of glossy magazine ads: “Peter Culvane admired the rich patina and clean lines of his Biedermeier credenza as he sipped coffee from an old mug. He certainly had access to the best china money could buy, but somehow coffee always tasted better in the chipped and discolored Stamford classic he had used since college days.” The plot is fairly low stakes—one storyline revolves heavily around a quince-scented face cream—and everything wraps up in a neat way, just as readers will expect. Even so, the author manages to achieve a mostly satisfying mix of humor, sexual tension, female friendship, and spiritual rejuvenation.
An atmospheric tale that deftly captures the leisure and egos of its expensive spa setting.Pub Date: May 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68433-464-3
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: April 20, 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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