A propulsive, nuanced, achingly real novel that will appeal to both Colleen Hoover fans and devotees of Irish fiction.
In Dublin, a pregnant woman with two little girls flees a controlling, critical husband.
O’Donnell’s striking debut opens with what looks from a distance like a happy family at the seashore. Close up, the water is too cold, the wind is too strong, and as tiny as they are, the girls have outgrown their wetsuits and their father is screaming at their mother, demanding to know what she’d done with the money he gave her to buy new ones. By the end of the first chapter, we want to get away from Ryan as badly as Ciara does, even if he’s handsome, loyal, a good provider, and hasn’t actually hit her...yet. That wetsuit money has been tucked away in a diaper bag in preparation for something Ciara hasn’t quite admitted to herself she’s going to do. And then, at last, it’s time. O’Donnell’s novel follows Ciara, Ella, and Sophie as they negotiate the harsh realities of sudden homelessness, father’s rights, and the Irish housing crisis. Ciara’s mother and sister live in England, she’s lost her pre-marriage friends, and she can pay for no more than one night’s accommodation with that roll of bills. With Ryan constantly hounding her by text, she eventually finds her way into emergency accommodations in a hotel with a dedicated floor for unhoused women and families. Here, she will make a friend and begin to figure out next steps—which are that much more complicated when a pregnancy test reveals the reason for her recent nausea and exhaustion. The mounting tension and suspense as Ciara struggles to stay free and safe make the pages fly. O’Donnell gives us a great character to root for and a portrait of her situation that is both terrifying and ultimately inspiring. An afterword confirms the impression that it’s based on research into real women’s experiences.
A propulsive, nuanced, achingly real novel that will appeal to both Colleen Hoover fans and devotees of Irish fiction.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781643755700
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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
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
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