A pleasantly engaging and evocative historical novel with strong main characters.
Dunlap presents a mother-and-daughter drama set in the era of early silent movies.
It’s 1910, and 17-year-old Sylvie Button and her mother, Justine have been keeping secrets from each other. When Sylvie was a small child, the pair left Paris, establishing a new life in New York City. Justine found employment as a piecework seamstress, raising Sylvie as a single mother while working out of a tenement apartment in Lower Manhattan. She’s never told Sylvie anything about her father, nor about the circumstances surrounding their hasty exit from France. Meanwhile, Sylvie, a top student who’s on track to receive a teaching scholarship, has begun fantasizing about a future that will disrupt Justine’s carefully laid plans for her; she longs to work in the burgeoning silent movie industry and perhaps even become like the famous young woman she sees onscreen at the nickelodeon: “I didn’t fall in love with the Vitagraph girl. I wanted to be the Vitagraph girl.” It’s a dream she shares with Paolo Bonnano, a handsome Italian man whom she meets at church one Sunday. Paolo convinces her to have pictures taken by a professional photographer who owes him a favor. When Sylvie returns home after a photoshoot, she finds Justine in the arms of a strange man and runs away from home with Paolo, who’s running away for other reasons; they find themselves in the middle of a wicked blizzard that’s hit the city. Dunlap’s melodrama is narrated in alternating chapters by Sylvie and Justine, their voices full of youthful determination and world-weary suspicion, respectively. The story can be overly melodramatic at times, but it offers an enjoyable peek behind the scenes of early moviemaking, with much of the story taking place in the Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn, where many original 10-minute silent shorts were filmed. A bit of adventure and danger keep the action moving at a steady clip, and readers will also be intrigued by the evolving friendship between Justine and her employer, Aaron Silverstein.
A pleasantly engaging and evocative historical novel with strong main characters.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781639886524
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.
In 16th-century Madrid, a crypto-Jew with a talent for casting spells tries to steer clear of the Inquisition.
Luzia Cotado, a scullion and an orphan, has secrets to keep: “It was a game she and her mother had played, saying one thing and thinking another, the bits and pieces of Hebrew handed down like chipped plates.” Also handed down are “refranes”—proverbs—in “not quite Spanish, just as Luzia was not quite Spanish.” When Luzia sings the refranes, they take on power. “Aboltar cazal, aboltar mazal” (“A change of scene, a change of fortune”) can mend a torn gown or turn burnt bread into a perfect loaf; “Quien no risica, no rosica” (“Whoever doesn’t laugh, doesn’t bloom”) can summon a riot of foliage in the depths of winter. The Inquisition hangs over the story like Chekhov’s famous gun on the wall. When Luzia’s employer catches her using magic, the ambitions of both mistress and servant catapult her into fame and danger. A new, even more ambitious patron instructs his supernatural servant, Guillén Santángel, to train Luzia for a magical contest. Santángel, not Luzia, is the familiar of the title; he has been tricked into trading his freedom and luck to his master’s family in exchange for something he no longer craves but can’t give up. The novel comes up against an issue common in fantasy fiction: Why don’t the characters just use their magic to solve all their problems? Bardugo has clearly given it some thought, but her solutions aren’t quite convincing, especially toward the end of the book. These small faults would be harder to forgive if she weren’t such a beautiful writer. Part fairy tale, part political thriller, part romance, the novel unfolds like a winter tree bursting into unnatural bloom in response to one of Luzia’s refranes, as she and Santángel learn about power, trust, betrayal, and love.
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781250884251
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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