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SHOTGUN JOHANNA

A richly detailed, if rather dizzying, tale of a spirited hero’s adventures.

The offbeat second daughter of a French mother and a Montana-born Marine recounts her struggles and romances in this contemporary novel.

In a Manhattan coffee shop, a writer named Burgess shares a table with Johanna von Eschenbach, a stranger. She reveals she has been wishing to tell her life story, so Burgess and Johanna meet for recording sessions, which result in the first-person novel that follows. Johanna begins her tale describing how she is the child of stunning Frenchwoman Marie-Aude and handsome Robert von Eschenbach, a Marine of German descent. Johanna and her older sister, Roberta, live in Wisconsin, where Marie-Aude has attained a post as a university professor. Johanna’s tempestuous parents finally separate when she is 2 years old, and she spends time in Montana with Robert when he is on leave. Her mother, also a talented pianist, favors the more traditionally attractive and accomplished Roberta. Thus, Johanna “learned very young that Roberta was Mom’s girl, and I was Dad’s.” Johanna becomes an adventurous sportswoman and spunky “Montana cowgirl” under Robert’s tutelage, at one point pulling out a shotgun from behind a bar as her strong yet gentle father seeks to defuse obnoxious patrons. Then, when Johanna is 12, her Montana and Wisconsin life balance shatters. She manages to move toward a surprising new closeness with her mother and then, after humiliating and healing sexual encounters near the end of high school, continues on to college and then a corporate law career. Along the way, she connects with several men, including someone similar to her father who also happens to have enduring ties to Roberta. Later, Johanna, facing physical challenges, experiences deep despair but then bright hope for the future.

Author Burgess notes that this book is a “first excursion into biographic story-telling” after penning some fantasy and “adventure romance” novels. Johanna’s story is certainly action-packed, with the fictional Burgess of the prologue at one point rightly noting that her tale is “an emotional rollercoaster.” This novel is a rather rollicking melodrama of “what’s going to happen next?” to Johanna, with her ending up having wide-ranging and exciting experiences, including romances with a struggling but soon-to-be famous Irish singer and a rich Swiss banker. Both affairs result in her taking the stage to participate in musical performances. Johanna is an appealing hero, not only pulling out that shotgun, but also waving a shovel to warn off attackers of a nerdy boyfriend. She brushes off being described in high school as someone “who looks like a boy in drag” by noting “my tits are small...I am what I am.” But the story gets a bit overstuffed with plot points, with two near rapes and two bouts of cancer to contend with, plus the uncovering of a love child. The period setting of the tale is a bit hazy, although texting is mentioned. Overall, this story is pulled along by its never-boring first-person protagonist, who lives up to how the fictional Burgess describes her: “There was something about her that arrested my eye, made me want to know her.”

A richly detailed, if rather dizzying, tale of a spirited hero’s adventures.

Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2021

ISBN: 9798778715165

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2023

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INTERMEZZO

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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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

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