An original tale filled with truth and vulnerability that illustrates the many ways in which war can rage.
A young Greek psychiatrist far from home strikes up an unlikely friendship with a misunderstood Vietnam War veteran in Edgewater’s novel.
Miko Papagiannis, the passionate son of a fisherman, lives far from the sparkling Aegean Sea where he grew up. Now a psychiatrist in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Miko is assigned to counsel AJ Connolly, a drunk, violent Vietnam War veteran who stumbled into the hospital emergency room wielding a gun and single bullet. Week after week, Miko explores the veteran’s tortured mind and tangled past, uncovering his own truths along the way. Though Miko is successful, adept, and adored by his loving wife, he, too, is at war—within himself (Miko harbors an intense guilt after leaving his mother and father overseas). With no choice but to move forward through the fog of uncertainty, both Miko and AJ struggle to find peace while confronting challenging and shocking revelations. Edgewater spins a provocative and unique tale that centers around an unlikely and complex relationship. The work includes passages of poetic prose that drop the reader straight into the “solar sparkle of an ancient and fabled Aegean Sea” as well as profound insights regarding humanity’s proclivity for conflict and desire for love. Much of the dialogue, however, reads as rather stilted and unrealistic; the author often opts for long monologues in which significant topics such as war, domestic violence, and sexual assault are not treated with the gravity one might expect. Miko’s character is, on the surface, both tantalizing and tortured, but begs to be further explored. (AJ’s stories of his time in the Navy dominate the narrative.) While the novel is expertly plotted and paced, more introspection would aid the readers in feeling truly drawn to the characters. Still, the distinctiveness of the plot and primary relationship will keep readers turning the pages.
An original tale filled with truth and vulnerability that illustrates the many ways in which war can rage.Pub Date: May 31, 2025
ISBN: 9798992902600
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2025
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 welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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