Looks at trauma, wealth, and infatuation through a startlingly original lens.
A woman obsessed with the show Three’s Company wins the lottery and replicates the world of the sitcom to live in.
Bonnie Lincoln is a Three’s Company superfan: She’s got multiple copies of all 172 episodes of the beloved 1970s TV show as well as small items of memorabilia: T-shirts, tickets to tapings. She can’t afford much living in a trailer and working at Scheele’s Market, a mom-and-pop grocery owned by the family of her best friend, Krystal. But when Bonnie buys a ticket for a record-setting lottery and then emerges as the sole winner, she knows immediately what she’ll do with the money: buy an enormous parcel of land and set to work replicating every last detail, to the food in the cupboards, of the Three’s Company environment. No one, not even Krystal, knows all the details or the depth of Bonnie’s obsession: “Other people can ruin a dream,” Bonnie muses, “just by knowing it.” Hutson swings back and forth between the building of Bonnie’s obsessive and isolated fantasy and her life before, uncovering the forces in her past—first the death of her father by suicide, then the death of her mother a few years later, and finally a horrifying trauma suffered by both her and Krystal—that led Bonnie to turn so wholly away from the real world and into the sun-soaked nostalgia of a sitcom. Hutson is far too smart, though, to turn Bonnie into an easy case study on the effects of trauma; Bonnie is both self-aware and resolute that her turn away from the world is justified. Hutson’s prose, too, is as cleareyed and convincing as the novel’s premise is farcical. But, as Bonnie reminds us, “Farce punishes everyone eventually.”
Looks at trauma, wealth, and infatuation through a startlingly original lens.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-86664-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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