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DEAR CHILD

The plot is sufficiently creepy and twisty, but without well-developed characters, the reader's buy-in will be limited.

A father’s quest for his kidnapped daughter, gone 13 years, may finally have borne fruit.

Hausmann’s debut, translated from the German, revolves around a young woman who has been held captive in a windowless forest cabin on the border between Bavaria and the Czech Republic. As the story opens, she has escaped, one of her two children in tow, only to be hit by a car on the road just outside the woods. She’s in intensive care, unable to explain much of anything; her daughter, Hannah, though extremely intelligent, has developmental issues that make her unhelpful to investigators as well. Once it’s determined that the injured woman’s name is Lena, the police are able to connect her with a 13-year-old cold case involving the disappearance of a college student in Munich. The round-robin narration switches among Lena, Hannah, and Lena’s father, Matthias Beck. Matthias has been counting and cursing the days—4,825 of them—since his daughter went missing. Now, at last, he gets the call he’s been waiting for, and he and his wife accompany the police investigator, a close family friend, to the hospital—only to find out the woman in the bed is not their Lena. But wait—there’s a little girl in the hallway who is their daughter’s spitting image. Hausmann’s novel has been billed as Room meets Gone Girl for its combination of mother and kids locked up in a hidey-hole with dueling, often dissimulating, unreliable narrators. But both of those blockbuster antecedents are strongly character-driven. Here, possibly in the interest of withholding information, the author has failed to make the central characters seem like real people, and the supporting ones are barely outlined. For this reason, the reveals in the latter part of the book are less exciting than they should be.

The plot is sufficiently creepy and twisty, but without well-developed characters, the reader's buy-in will be limited.

Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-25076-853-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020

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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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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

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