A novel that lionizes the desire to be alone even as it recognizes the beauty and grace found within a family.
An inveterate loner gives up her cherished solitude for the lure of love but finds that “the strength of family ties” may bind too tightly.
When we first meet the narrator of this tightly controlled meditation on sensuality, passion, and duty, she is squatting alone in the rain waiting for the freighter that will take her away from her temporary job as a mess-hall cook at an isolated camp on the Chilean coast and into an uncertain future. Taciturn, self-reliant, and stubborn, our narrator has come to the tip of the world in search of “true zero,” a place where she can stop “pretend[ing] life had a structure.” Though her three-month contract at the camp has ended, she refuses to return to the “devastating possibility of the same old job” and instead signs on as the freighter’s cook, spending the next few years traveling up and down the South American coast. This itinerant life satisfies with its repetitive labor, its lack of expectations beyond the immediate needs of the body, the beauty of its vistas that can be appreciated from afar; but then our narrator meets Samsa, a young Icelandic woman with “white-blonde hair [and] swimmer’s shoulders,” in a port city cafe and falls in instant lust. Her feelings are reciprocated, and she soon becomes involved in an elliptical relationship with Samsa, who renames her Boulder after the “large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element.” When Samsa accepts a position in Reykjavík, Boulder moves there with her and tries to settle into a landlocked life, rocked only by the swells of her passion for her lover. Samsa, however, wants to expand and solidify their family with a little yellow house on the outskirts of the city and a baby whose arrival will erase everything that came before but replace it with nothing as solid as “the strength of [the] family ties” that Samsa so fondly imagines for them. Boulder’s emotional isolation coupled with the poetic intensity of her sexuality makes her a striking character, unique in action and in thought, and the prose lilts in truly surprising ways as it navigates the plot’s more familiar tropes of love and desire, dedication and alienation. The book is a modern love story—global, queer, existential in its moral hierarchies—but it is also a rumination on those two most ancient of words: lover and mother.
A novel that lionizes the desire to be alone even as it recognizes the beauty and grace found within a family.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-91350-538-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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