Tender, if sometimes-trite, tales of Ireland adventures.
O’Leary offers two intimate novellas set in Ireland, separated by half a century.
The first novella, “An Unspoken Peace,” focuses on Conor Fenney, a young Irish American man from Chicago who yearns to connect with his ancestors’ past. In 1969, Conor attends summer school at Trinity College, where he meets his rakish, well-to-do roommate, Aidan. What results is a chronicle of concealed queer desire and grief that blurs the contours of male companionship, interspersed with detailed gestures toward Irish histories and landscapes. Fifty years later, in 2019, an unnamed, aging man in “The Galway Girl” returns to Ireland to visit the Cliffs of Moher following the death of his wife of 45 years. There he meets Brooke, a 33-year-old American woman training to be a counselor for “young people with addiction issues.” The two form an unlikely, quiet connection bounded by their limited time together as they travel through Galway for a single day. These are simple, straightforward stories that present tender moments of human connection. However, the prose is often monotonous and unvaried; the narration lacks nuance, turning something as simple as “warm stew...weak on the meat, but strong on potatoes” into Conor’s unchallenged speculation that “the cook was trying to make up for all the years the potatoes failed the Irish.” Most interestingly, the collection immediately establishes a tenuous connection between the two novellas, the first noting from its very beginning that Conor was 17 when he first visited Ireland and still reminisces about his encounter 50 years later. Meanwhile, the aging male character in “The Galway Girl” remarks that he “went to Trinity College in Dublin for a summer session right out of high school,” just as Conor does in “An Unspoken Peace.” Although there’s little elaboration upon the connections between Conor and his ostensible older self, it is perhaps this blank space between the two novellas that rings most painfully true to life—much goes unspoken, and much comes undone.
Tender, if sometimes-trite, tales of Ireland adventures.Pub Date: March 18, 2023
ISBN: 978-1733534147
Page Count: 211
Publisher: Swan Creek Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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