A fun time-travel novel for an extremely specific audience.
A musical theater superfan follows his heroes through time in Cole’s novel.
In Brooklyn, 1983, 25-year-old Michael Marvin Minkus—Mikey for short—loves one person more than anyone on earth: Ethel Merman. He lives with his widowed mother, Rifka, in a small apartment where, perpetually in-between jobs, he pores over his collection of records, posters, and clippings related to his idol. To his horror, he reads news in the tabloids of Ethel Merman’s inoperable brain tumor. Despite the odds, Mikey manages to sneak his way into Ethel’s apartment—and arrives there while another Broadway legend, Mary Martin, happens to be visiting her old rival for the first time in a year. As if that weren’t fantastic enough, Mikey takes the opportunity to snoop around in Ethel’s closet…and ends up, in Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe style, transported back to the dressing room of the Imperial Theatre in 1939. There he meets Ethel and Mary while they are young and on the cusp of stardom. Through a series of similarly magical leaps, Mikey follows the two through the rest of their careers, appearing always at moments when the two frenemies cross paths. Is this the ultimate dream come true for the ultimate fan? Or will Mikey learn why it’s usually better not to meet your heroes? Cole’s rapturous prose succeeds in capturing Mikey’s fanboy ecstasy at getting to witness so many significant moments from musical history: “Mikey’s head almost spun off of his neck in pleasure. He was there when South Pacific was being conceived! He might have even helped decide its fate by suggesting Dick and Oscar as the authors. Oh, how he hoped he would be around for the birth, too.” The book seems made for readers who, like Mikey, can’t get enough of Merman and Martin. There’s plenty of Ethel and Mary, though not a ton of plot, and readers who aren’t so steeped in Broadway lore may find themselves somewhat bored.
A fun time-travel novel for an extremely specific audience.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798985934458
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Moreclacke Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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