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COPY BOY

An expressive and striking story that examines what one does for family and for oneself.

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A novel about an ambitious young woman who navigates familial trauma while working as a copy boy in late-1930s San Francisco.

At the height of the Great Depression, 17-year-old Jane Hopper arrives home one night to find her pregnant mother packing their possessions into the car of federal labor camp manager Uno Jeffers. Her mother wants them to move, and when Jane’s father, Abraham, arrives home inebriated and angry, a domestic brawl ensues. Jane feels an obligation to her mother, who blames her for the death of Jane’s stillborn fraternal twin, Benjamin, so she fights her father. During the melee, she hears her brother’s voice in her head urging her on, and she leaves Abraham for dead. Her mother has left without her, so Jane flees to San Francisco for a fresh start. Three months later, she’s working for a newspaper called the Prospect and posing as a boy with her brother’s name, Benny Hopper. While working as a copy boy, Jane meets a woman named Vee who says, “I’ve got a story for you, rookie.” They make an appointment to meet, which Jane doesn’t keep; then Vee is attacked and hospitalized. Jane finds a picture of Vee and decides to look into the woman’s life, which leads her to uncover a story of corruption that ties Jane’s own new life to her former one. In her debut, Blanton-Stroud, who teaches writing at Sacramento State University, effectively evokes the dichotomy of Jane’s rural and urban lifestyles, particularly when highlighting Jane’s family’s poverty. The author’s descriptive language is robust, especially when setting scenes: “Benjamin Franklin Hopper was born into a shattered bulb, shards buried under the loose, gray silt of a ravaged Texas plain.” There are occasional minor errors, and the device of Jane repeatedly hearing Benjamin’s voice in her head doesn’t add very much to the narrative aside from a very strong opening. Even so, Blanton-Stroud’s book remains an engrossing work of fiction.

An expressive and striking story that examines what one does for family and for oneself.

Pub Date: June 24, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-63152-697-8

Page Count: 264

Publisher: She Writes Press

Review Posted Online: May 4, 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 NIGHTINGALE

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

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