Fans of Jenny Offill and Rachel Cusk will enjoy this unusual work of personal mythology.
The daughter of two deaf parents explores her identity in a shape-shifting work straddling the boundaries of genre.
Durastanti, a noted Italian writer born in Brooklyn, formulates her first novel as a series of autobiographical and philosophical vignettes organized by theme: Family, Travels, Health, Work & Money, Love, and What's Your Sign. The often whimsical subheadings include "The Girl Absent for Dizzy Spells" and "The Love That Would Not End for Another Eighteen Years, If It Ever Did, Began." While the beginning of the book focuses on her parents' origins and the final sections on her own experience of couple-hood as an adult, the book is resolutely nonlinear; the author confides in an afterword that she would have loved to have every copy printed with a different chapter sequence. "But is it a true story?" is a question first posed by the narrator's mother, who "hates fiction" and "believes The Exorcist is a realist masterpiece," and it returns repeatedly right up until the last sentence of the book. Who can say? "It takes only a little misstep to slip out of a novel, to fall into an autobiography and resurface again as an essay, all in the short span of a sentence." The author's parents are romantic characters given to extremes—they met the day her father tried to jump off the Sisto Bridge in Trastevere, or possibly the day he saved her mother from two thieves who were kicking her and trying to yank away her purse. Growing up in a chaotic, confusing family between Brooklyn and rural southern Italy, the author and her older brother, who were never taught sign language, bonded intensely. "When I'm asked who taught me to speak properly...I realize the first language I spoke was that of the first person I loved: the Italian of a boy six years my senior." Further guideposts and socialization were provided by literature, cinema, and music: Last Exit to Brooklynwas "the book that changed everything...revealing all my insides," while in her adolescence, R.E.M's Automatic For the People was an alternative to a social life: "For some reason, sinking into a dimension of held-in breath, potential euthanasia, and men on the moon was comforting."
Fans of Jenny Offill and Rachel Cusk will enjoy this unusual work of personal mythology.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-08794-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”
A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.
Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780316258876
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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
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