A compassionate, balanced, and engaging look at generational conflict—and resolution—during social upheaval.
Three Ukrainian women—a mother, daughter, and granddaughter—forge connections and evolve while the Soviet Union collapses around them.
Bitter cold permeates many of the scenes in this aptly titled novel. From harsh Soviet Ukrainian winters to icy weather abroad, the climate is an often hostile force that reflects the political and emotional drama that unfolds. The work offers a multigenerational family story. The father, Lyaksandro Hadeon Rosomakha, must leave his home, his wife, and his daughter after being caught spying for Ukrainian nationalists. He journeys to London, where he assumes a new identity in shame, far from his family. But this tale isn’t about Lyaksandro. Rather, Brown focuses on the women he left behind: Ivanna, his wife; and Yevtsye, his daughter. Moving from the 1970s to the present day, the story chronicles the women’s experiences, providing a rich overview of the end of the Soviet Union and the intellectual and social unrest that creates an independent Ukraine. The most intriguing moments explore the tensions between mother and daughter, who represent contrasting views of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian nationalism. Ivanna is a secular Communist Party loyalist, while her daughter is swept up by the appeals for Ukrainian autonomy and by the Orthodox Church. But through these women’s eyes, momentous events in history and economic and social policies become catalysts to explore a dynamic familial relationship and highlight how the duo survives in the face of outside pressures, including food shortages and political turbulence. Eventually, Yevtsye welcomes her own daughter, Ionna, into the family (which includes her husband, Danya). When Ionna’s birth leads to Yevtsye’s postpartum depression, the story offers a vivid, complementary series of glimpses of motherhood in which the complicated emotions of one mother-daughter pair are examined next to those of another. Ultimately, Ionna, who grows up craving to become a writer, brings the engrossing narrative forward from the end of the 20th century into the 21st. While there’s a great deal of improbability in her portion of the tale, with plenty of airport hijinks, Ionna’s story of her own struggle for survival (mirroring her mother’s and grandmother’s) brings the novel—and many of its threads—to a satisfying and resonant close.
A compassionate, balanced, and engaging look at generational conflict—and resolution—during social upheaval.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63988-142-0
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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