Falls short of a magnum opus but with enough lovely notes to make it worth a look.
A young woman who can change her skin color searches for belonging and freedom from a difficult home life through music.
“My mother could change the color of her skin”: Gabrielle, the narrator, has inherited this gift, which she calls “passing.” Gabrielle is about to graduate from high school in Florida as the novel opens, and though her color-changing has been largely out of her control, she’s managed to keep her condition unnoticed by everyone but her parents. Her father, a Black lawyer with aspirations to be the perfect Republican, prefers that both Gabrielle and her mother (who is Black and Indigenous) pass as White when he gets home from work, to match their house’s all-white interior. “There were no dark things allowed in our home—except for whiskey, and him,” Gabrielle tells us. When Gabrielle’s father decides she should be pre-med at the University of Florida—“It's very competitive,” a campus tour guide tells them. “But it's a great program”—he demands she take a year off after high school to work on her extracurricular activities, giving her a better shot at admission. She begins taking piano lessons from Dominique, a young Jamaican woman whose brightly colored home and vibrant family life are everything Gabrielle wishes her own could be. Organized into parts corresponding to movements in Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, Neal’s narrative takes us through Gabrielle’s struggle to understand who she truly is and what she wants at the same time that her family irrevocably shatters. Like Gabrielle herself, though, the novel never quite settles on how to present itself, and many questions of narrative logic—characters’ motivations and histories, how Gabrielle’s passing works—go unanswered.
Falls short of a magnum opus but with enough lovely notes to make it worth a look.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781646221196
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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
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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