An often engaging melodrama in which characters struggle to maintain their dignity while pursuing the elusive American dream.
The hardscrabble lives of an immigrant family intersect with those of the extremely wealthy in this historical novel set in the steel mills and coal mines of Western Pennsylvania in Pasterick’s debut novel.
The author introduces her book’s main characters individually in short, third-person narratives set on a single day in May 1910. Janos and Karina Kovac are Eastern European immigrants who still struggle to survive after a decade of backbreaking work in seedy Riverton, Pennsylvania. He works at a steel mill for 12 hours each day; she was recently hired as a housekeeper by one of the mill’s managers. Karina’s willingness to provide sexual favors to Henry Archer, her bachelor employer, has made her confident that her job is secure. Unlike Janos, she’s a detached, indifferent parent to their two young children, Sofie and Lukas. A tragic accident at the mill coincides with Karina’s discovery that Henry will be leaving Riverton in a month, initiating a momentous series of events. These culminate in an unsolved murder; the abrupt disappearance of several people, including Karina; and the loss of young Lukas’ leg. The story then skips ahead seven years, and the Kovac family has moved on and achieved a measure of comfort, but a hurricane threatens this calm, and a horrific coal mining accident affects a dear friend. The novel’s structure presents many short chapters from different points of view, giving energy to the complex exposition, which addresses such topics as mental illness, infertility, rape, and postpartum depression. The larger community deals with unsafe workplaces, anti-union violence, and anti-immigrant sentiment. Two industrial accidents, both resulting from poor management and avarice, are described in chilling detail; one is in the steel mill, as “a ladle carrying a hundred tons of molten metal crashed to the ground...sending splatters of fiery liquid twenty-five feet in every direction.” The other is a coal mine collapse that kills several and traps others underground. Some narrative flourishes feel overplayed, however, as when a bereft woman banishes the color red from her house after suffering a miscarriage.
An often engaging melodrama in which characters struggle to maintain their dignity while pursuing the elusive American dream.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-191-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”
A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.
Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780316258876
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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