Historical burlesque as lively in invention as it is ingenious in execution.
Imagine a post-millennial trickster spin on The Red Badge of Courage only with broader landscapes, complex racial dynamics, and corrosive humor.
Call him Anders. He’s a tall, pale teenage naif who gets so swept up in the maelstrom of the Civil War that by 1863, he’s been a regimental flag bearer for both the Union and Confederate armies before barely surviving the Yankees’ rout at Gettysburg and staggering into an all-Black Union regiment. With the craftiness he’s had to depend on since leaving behind his abusive mother, Anders blends in with his new platoon with stolen blue duds and a claim to being an octoroon (i.e. mixed race). The Black troopers skeptically indulge this white-boy straggler’s story and take him in as one of their own—and they are as motley a crew as can be imagined in anybody’s army. There’s Corporal Tobias Gleason, a playwright specializing in what he calls “speculative theater” about “The American Future.” Also notable among Anders’ new compatriots are Joaquin Geoffroy, a Haitian-born double agent embedded among African American soldiers “to inspire greater brutality against their white countrymen,” an “eternally frowning black giant” named Mole, and Thomas, a grouchy freed slave with ongoing, unresolved grievances against God (and just about everything else). There’s another teenager in the regiment, a bugler named Petey, who’s as “light” in skin color as Anders and is just as vague about his true origins. With a captured, duplicitous white arms dealer named Slade Jefferson in tow, Anders and his adopted brothers-in-arms embark on a perilous, sometimes-savage journey that takes them to a New York City whose streets are stained with Black blood from the draft riots. Then Gleason is emboldened to lead the wayward regiment to San Valentin, a Nevada settlement offering a prototype of a freer, more equitable America “unstained by cotton.” Grand dreams, inflated egos, and cruel twists of fate are often the stuff of great satires and this first novel by Dayle evokes such classic accounts of the human condition in conflict as Candide, Catch-22, and at least a couple of books by Evelyn Waugh.
Historical burlesque as lively in invention as it is ingenious in execution.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781250345677
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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