A remarkable education in the grief of staying alive.
Hewn out of the brutality of Watership Down and the trenchant ironies of Animal Farm, this is an animal story for adults.
A fable that makes Aesop’s darkest seem saccharine, Italian author Zannoni’s debut novel concerns Archy, a beech marten (a weasel-like animal) inhabiting a stretch of forest with his small family. With a dead father, a harsh, unfeeling mother, and siblings barely able to make their way through the brush, young Archy can only envision a Hobbesian future for himself: nasty, brutish, and short. When his mother sells him as a slave to the mysterious Solomon, a fox who has set himself up as the woodland’s only trader-lender (with the help of his bodyguard/enforcer, a dog called Joel), Archy finds himself receiving many beatings for his clumsy mistakes as well as an odd, intriguing education at Solomon’s hands. Gradually, the marten meets other denizens of the forest and discovers life to be nothing less than drenched in the red of tooth and claw. Growing into a stumbling adulthood, Archy wills himself to learn at Solomon’s feet, to open himself up to the fox’s abusive instruction, which stems from a strange human book, the Bible, which the old trader found years earlier while feeding on the body of a hanged man. In time, Archy yearns to live on a higher, less degraded plane and turns to his painfully acquired writing talents to make sense of the carnage around him. The character of Archy, in all his awkward, vulnerable marten-ness, emerges as courageously as any classical hero. Finding happiness in the arms of a beloved only to have her ripped away, finding stability in the trading post after the death of his master only to be driven from it by interlopers, he is a noble, tormented protagonist striving amid a beastly contingent of the selfish, stupid, and evil. This darkly beguiling novel casts its enchantments with an eye trained on the human heart, with its false chambers and rough, bestial inclinations.
A remarkable education in the grief of staying alive.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781681377285
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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
© 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.
