Finely detailed if sometimes slow.
The reclusive driver of a bookmobile encounters a life-changing stranger during his travels.
The protagonist of this novel—a man so fully devoted to his traveling library that he’s simply known to all as "the Driver"—leads a quiet and particular life: He occupies a small Quebec City apartment alone; socializes primarily with a lone author friend; and is characterized by a handful of “idiosyncratic ideas” honed privately over the course of his lifetime (“if two people were really made to get along together, they should like not only the same books and the same songs, but also the same passages in his books and songs”). For almost his entire adulthood, his routine has varied little. He makes seasonal rounds in his mobile library (a converted milk truck) to bring everything from Hemingway to publisher-rejected manuscripts to the far-flung readers of Canada’s North Shore and surrounding areas. Now aging, he anticipates his final book "tour," but his routine is thrown into disarray upon meeting Marie, the enigmatic and captivating manager of sorts for a traveling brass band. The Driver is instantly engaged by her “tenderness and strength,” and, as he befriends and travels alongside the band (they in a refurbished school bus), he and Marie forge a close and intangible bond. As the Driver, full of melancholy, soaks in the details of his penultimate tour—the austere, lonely landscapes; the strange fellow readers, from fishermen’s wives to hydroplane pilots—he and Marie grow closer, exposing the vulnerability of two introverted souls struggling to close a chasm between them. Quaint and understated, Poulin’s novel offers a deeply felt meditation on loneliness, age, and the improbability of human connection. Set against a lovingly rendered landscape, the ups and downs of Marie and the Driver’s relationship are often affecting, though the novel lacks the panache to become something truly original. Those seeking a tender (albeit sometimes milquetoast) account of two intersecting lives, however, will end this book satisfied and even moved.
Finely detailed if sometimes slow.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953861-06-1
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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