A delightfully engaging combination of Lassie and The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.
A debut novel chronicles the escapades of an intrepid canine displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Buck is a 2-year-old, mixed-breed, 55-pound family dog. Despite his dysfunctional human family, the Browns, Buck’s basic needs are met and he is loved. That all changes when he is swept away by Mississippi River floodwaters caused by Katrina. Swimming frantically and then finding a board to climb on, Buck eventually is tossed back onto dry land. Cold, hungry, and scared, he must find a way to survive. The next day, he begins walking—and walking. Finally, he spots a house with a chicken coop. But when he scores a bird, a farmer appears, fires a gun, and hits Buck with a spray of pellets. After a night of rest, the canine follows a road into the small community of Lyman, Mississippi, where he finds a main-street grocery store. He sits down, hoping someone will give him food. Here, he meets the two small pooches, also orphaned by the storm, who will become his temporary travel buddies: Lady, a blond Pekingese, and Teddy, a Jack Russell terrier. Lawrence-Verploegen’s tale is now off to a well-paced start. Buck shares the food he receives from a kindly woman, and he and his new crew head off for several adventures, one of which lands Teddy at the veterinarian. Buck and Lady return to the road, winding up at the home of a wealthy widow, Wilma Witherspoon, where they are welcomed and receive new names: Hoss and Angel. The author uses the pair’s stay with Witherspoon to insert diverse bits and pieces of Mississippi history into the narrative, including a look at Chinese immigration to the state and the region’s battle to combat hookworm. The short stories are intriguing but they divert attention from the primary plot. The linguistic tenor of these tales and the narrative in general seems more appropriate for an adolescent audience than for adults. Still, this heroic dog will evoke fond memories of canine stars of yesteryear. The enjoyable story regains steam when Buck/Hoss unexpectedly finds himself on the move again, his life following a trajectory that will lead him to his true mission.
A delightfully engaging combination of Lassie and The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72833-552-0
Page Count: 222
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
