Shteyngart is doing his most important work ever, illuminating the current tragedy with humor, smarts, and heart.
A brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country.
“It was said by both her pediatrician and her psychologist that Vera, while presenting as a very bright ten-year-old, suffered from intense anxiety.” Vera Bradford-Shmulkin really does have a lot on her plate for a kid. Among the 23 chapter titles in this slim and explosively lovely novel: “She had to hold the family together.” “She had to survive recess.” “She had to expand her Things I Still Need to Know Diary.” “She had to figure out if Daddy was a traitor.” “She had to fall asleep.” The novel is set in a delicately constructed near future, with self-driving cars and smart chessboards and a proposed constitutional amendment that will give an “‘enhanced vote’…counting for five-thirds of a regular vote to so-called ‘exceptional Americans,’ those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.” These are the words of Vera’s teacher, who is dividing the class into teams to debate the topic. She makes half-Korean, half-Russian Vera the lead for the pro-Five-Three side, while the opposition will be led by an "exceptional American" type her parents call Moncler Stephen because of his jacket. Winning this debate is another thing Vera has to do, along with getting up the nerve to deliver “Ten Great Things About Daddy and Why You Should Stay Together with Him,” and its counterpart, “Six Great Things About Mom” to the parents in question, who fight constantly. This mom is the one she calls “Anne mom,” her WASP stepmother Anne Bradford; “Mom Mom,” her Korean biological mother, has long been out of the picture and she has never known why. (“She had to find out the truth about Mom Mom.”) This book is about so many things: the drama of the gifted child, nativism and immigrant culture (“She had to visit Baba Tanya and Grandpa Boris in the suburbs”), technology and oppression, the role of intellectuals, the way we learn language. As the political situation in the United States evolves, Shteyngart’s particular flavor of black humor—Russian wry?—reconnects with its roots in sorrow and resistance and becomes essential and lifesaving.
Shteyngart is doing his most important work ever, illuminating the current tragedy with humor, smarts, and heart.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593595091
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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