Allende is too caught up in drawing historical and political parallels to imbue her characters with life.
A novel about all sorts of characters crossing all sorts of borders.
Allende’s latest begins in Vienna on Kristallnacht, when Samuel Adler’s father is beaten so badly he eventually dies from his injuries. But Samuel doesn’t find that out until years have passed: After Samuel’s mother places him on a Kindertransport train to England, he loses touch with both parents. Then Allende jumps to the United States, where Leticia Cordero has ended up (illegally) after narrowly surviving the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. In alternating chapters, Allende also describes Anita Díaz, a 7-year-old girl separated from her mother in a detention facility after crossing illegally into Arizona; Selena, a social worker trying to help Anita; and Frank, a hotshot lawyer who joins Anita’s case because he has the hots for Selena. Eventually—predictably—all these storylines intersect. Unfortunately, the two-dimensional characters never come to life. Neither does their dialogue, which is overstuffed with exposition. Allende uses her characters shamelessly as political mouthpieces. Hapless Frank, for example, complains: “But we can’t just open the floodgates and let millions of immigrants and refugees in. What’s the solution, Selena?” Selena, as you can imagine, tells him. This tactic appears throughout the book, which leans heavily on blatant exposition and draws heavy-handed parallels between Hitler’s Europe and Trump’s America. “Hitler used terror as a political tactic,” Allende writes, “taking advantage of discontent over economic woes.” This habit might have been more tolerable if Allende’s conclusions weren’t so trite. On Kristallnacht, she writes, a “sense of misfortune hung in the air.” There is little here that is original and even less that is genuinely moving.
Allende is too caught up in drawing historical and political parallels to imbue her characters with life.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593598108
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
Haig’s positive message will keep his fans happy.
A British widow travels to Ibiza and learns that it’s never too late to have a happy life.
In a world that seems to be getting more unstable by the moment, Haig’s novels are a steady ship in rough seas, offering a much-needed positive message. In works like the bestselling The Midnight Library (2020), he reminds us that finding out what you truly love and where you belong in the universe are the foundations of building a better existence. His latest book continues this upbeat messaging, albeit in a somewhat repetitive and facile way. Retired British schoolteacher Grace Winters discovers that an old acquaintance has died and left her a ramshackle home in Ibiza. A widow who lost her only child years earlier, Grace is at first reluctant to visit the house, because, at 72, she more or less believes her chance for happiness is over—but when she rouses herself to travel to the island, she discovers the opposite is true. A mystery surrounds her friend’s death involving a roguish islander, his activist daughter, an internationally famous DJ, and a strange glow in the sea that acts as a powerful life force and upends Grace’s ideas of how the cosmos works. Framed as a response to a former student’s email, the narrative follows Grace’s journey from skeptic (she was a math teacher, after all) to believer in the possibility of magic as she learns to move on from the past. Her transformation is the book’s main conflict, aside from a protest against an evil developer intent on destroying Ibiza’s natural beauty. The outcome is never in doubt, and though the story often feels stretched to the limit—this novel could have easily been a novella—the author’s insistence on the power of connection to change lives comes through loud and clear.
Haig’s positive message will keep his fans happy.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593489277
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
© 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.
