A winding, offbeat, and sometimes-affecting journey.
Lieberman presents a literary novel about a man in crisis.
It’s the 2010s, and Lev Ockenshaw is a 29-year-old transgender man living in Boston and working at a company that makes security cameras. He’s not too excited about the job; what garners his interest instead is Chad Goeing, a man who died in 1900 and left behind an unpublished work called The Nature of Time. His official cause of death is unknown, which prompts Lev to do some investigating—and obsessing. Then Chad appears to Lev as a ghost. This is, however, not the only thing on Lev’s mind; he has a tumultuous friendship with a trans man named Stanley. For the most part, the two get along swimmingly until an incident involving a 1998 Ford Taurus. Back at Lev’s job, he receives a cryptic email about the company that reads, in part: “You are all being investigated now to account for your crimes.” Lev tries to bring this to the attention of his boss, but the response is tepid at best. Lucky for Lev, as he tries to unravel various mysteries, he also forms a bond with his co-worker Aparna. At one point, Lev, Stanley, and Aparna wind up swapping stories around a campfire in an homage of sorts to the 1990 Nickelodeon TV show Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Interspersed throughout these and other events are many heady conversations and observations involving a wide range of topics, including the philosophy of René Descartes, the Talmud, and the talking toy Teddy Ruxpin. There’s a portion considering “Rumpelstiltskin” as “a story that assumes cisgender people’s fear of transgender people,” for example, and frequent references to Abraham Zapruder’s film of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination (to which the title refers). Lev’s saga unfolds in a conversational manner, and as absurd as the hero’s adventures may seem at times, Lieberman uses them to form real connections with readers. For example, although Lev’s spat with Stanley is silly, Stanley’s absence for portions of the book has emotional impact, as when Lev says simply, “I wish I could call Stanley.” But the story, for all of its philosophical discussion, is not without its humor. At one point, for example, wild turkeys congregate behind Lev’s car not long before Thanksgiving, and he comments on how they seem to say, “We are not afraid of your car…nor your holiday. We are free.” However, most of the plot is resolved before the novel’s conclusion, which results in a meandering later section. Late in the game, Lev gets a new job, but this new position, along with the process of getting it, is largely inconsequential. Likewise, earlier portions, involving Lev’s quest to discover how Chad Goeing died, can drag, as there’s not much to make the reader care about how the writer died other than Lev’s insistence on finding out the truth. Yet, throughout it all, Lev proves to be a memorable protagonist—and one with a great deal on his mind.
A winding, offbeat, and sometimes-affecting journey.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 598
Publisher: tRaum Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2022
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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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