Next book

BITTERROOT

A gripping and emotionally intelligent tale of resentment and loss.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

In Vitello’s novel, a young widow grapples with an attack on her family.

The small former mining town of Steeplejack rests at the foot of Idaho’s Bitterroot Mountains. It’s there that Hazel Zapf was raised, and where she returns after some years away to marry her high school sweetheart, Ethan Mackenzie, and work as a forensic artist. “I draw dead and maimed bodies for a living,” Hazel puts it simply. Of Japanese descent on her mother’s side, Hazel likens the work to the tradition of Kusôzu, “the practice of capturing the beauty of a posthumous body’s organic decomposition. It serves as a meditation on impermanence and transcendence.” When, a few years into their marriage, Ethan is killed in a car accident, Hazel’s first impulse is to draw his body, there in the morgue, as a way of processing the loss. Soon after Ethan’s death, Hazel finds herself playing landlord to Corinda Blair, the surrogate mother of her gay twin brother’s baby, a woman she has despised since high school. When that brother, Kento, is shot at the baby’s gender reveal party by the surrogate’s estranged husband, Hazel finds herself at the center of a trial that unleashes a flood of racism and resentment against her family that has been building for generations. Might the rediscovered letters of her great-grandfather, a Japanese American veteran whose family was interned during the Second World War, provide a lesson on how Hazel should move forward? Vitello’s crystalline prose elegantly captures the numbing grief that grips Hazel for much of the novel. Here she describes her own awareness of it as she focuses on building a house in the aftermath of Ethan’s death: “Even as the new house took shape, I remained frozen. Inert as a slug during summer’s drought. The folks at Grief Group had finally stopped calling, and one day, I woke up to the realization that if I kept pushing folks away, I would, soon, be peopleless.” These memorable characters nimbly embody the larger cultural forces at war in contemporary America.

A gripping and emotionally intelligent tale of resentment and loss.

Pub Date: May 21, 2024

ISBN: 9781960573964

Page Count: 296

Publisher: Sibylline Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 290


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 290


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

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

Next book

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

Close Quickview