A visually and narratively appealing work of coming-of-age fiction.
In this adult debut from the Eisner Award–winning Tamaki cousins, a spring break trip to New York City gets messy for three young Canadian women.
In 2009, first-year university students Zee, Dani, and Fiona meet up at Newark Airport to commence a five-day adventure. Zee and Dani are childhood friends who grew up in North York; Fiona is a newer friend and classmate of Dani’s from the fine arts program at Concordia, while Zee is studying life science at Queen’s University in Ontario. Zee and Dani are thrilled to reunite and explore the city, while Fiona is self-assured to the point of being standoffish, decrying anything touristy such as Times Square and quick to offer forceful opinions (she skewers the Metropolitan Museum of Art as “a real monument to Western imperialism”). An attraction blossoms between feminine Fiona and androgynous Zee, beginning with subtle touches and stolen kisses while their trio is out sightseeing before culminating in more. Zee and Fiona’s budding closeness, though fraught in its own ways, leaves Dani feeling hurt and alienated, and the splintered dynamics threaten to compromise not only their trip, but also friendships old and new. This graphic novel presents a tightly focused story about the difficulty of competing loyalties and the anxieties of entering young adulthood and facing the possibility of growing apart from people you care about. Jillian Tamaki’s illustrations, rendered in peach, gray, light blue, and black, vividly capture the characters’ emotions and the wondrous clutter of the city landscape; double-page spreads meld reality with visual embellishment to depict especially potent experiences, from witnessing the scale of the giant blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History to the exhilaration of exploring queer crushes. Readers looking to indulge nostalgia about being a tourist in New York, from staying in a hostel to comparing the merits of different slices of pizza, will find much to enjoy; so will readers of stories about coming into one’s own in adulthood, with all of the myriad joys and stumbles that entails.
A visually and narratively appealing work of coming-of-age fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781770464339
Page Count: 444
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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