Kurkov gives us a rich cast of endearing characters and a glimpse of life in an old city on the eastern edge of Europe.
A Ukrainian city finds itself under siege from a series of threats straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie or an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!
“You know…some cities only exist so people can dream about going there,” one character tells another in Kurkov’s novel, originally published in Ukraine in 2012. “And sometimes the dreaming is more important than the going.” Now in English, his story paints a dreamlike portrait of Lviv, a major city in western Ukraine, and a strange mystery that dares to be solved. Chief among the sleuths are Taras, a young man who drives patients with kidney stones on cobblestone streets to shake them out; Alik, an old hippie who joins his long-haired brethren every September in Lychakiv Cemetery to memorialize Jimi Hendrix (whose right hand is rumored to be buried there); and Captain Ryabtsev, a former KGB officer who once spied on Alik and wants to be his friend. Such eccentric characters are a Kurkov staple, and so is the surreal situation confronting them: Rumors abound that a prehistoric sea may be rising under Lviv, which would explain a spate of violent seagull attacks and a strong smell of iodine that won’t go away. The search for an explanation forms the backdrop to Taras’ tender romance with Darka, a currency exchange clerk who’s allergic to handling money. Captain Ryabtsev goes on a similar search, and Kurkov’s characterization of the captain, who lost his sense of purpose when the Soviet Union collapsed, strikes a sad note in an otherwise lighthearted tale. Though the novel isn’t overtly political, Ryabtsev’s crisis of identity echoes Ukraine’s more than 20 years into its independence. And when Taras gets home after a kidney stone session and hears the national anthem on the radio—“The glory and freedom of our Ukraine has not yet perished”—reading those words now is much more poignant than it was when Kurkov first wrote them.
Kurkov gives us a rich cast of endearing characters and a glimpse of life in an old city on the eastern edge of Europe.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780063354548
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
