An absorbing tale of friendship that’s endearing as often as it’s unabashedly riotous.
The lives of the owner of a house-painting business and a teen runaway intersect in Barrett’s comic novel.
Waking up next to a dead woman would unsettle most people. But 31-year-old Sammy Davis Junior (Junior is his surname) is more worried about making it to Saturday brunch. His apparent apathy regarding the late bedmate—his regular hookup for the past month—makes South Tampa Det. O’Hare suspicious. Elsewhere, Penny Sullivan, torn up by guilt over her big sister, Catelyn’s death, has run away from home to evade boarding school. The 15-year-old travels under her sister’s name and feigns the background of a Canadian backpacker. Looking for a place to squat, Penny enters the orbit of a house-painting crew, a business Sammy and his two friends have run since high school. As she joins them on a multiday gig at the same location where she’s secretly bunking, Penny unexpectedly bonds with the older men. They play silly games, like dreaming up the most offbeat haiku, and execute well-planned pranks on local businesses. Penny and Sammy are more alike than either of them realizes; they both have father issues—Penny is certain her father doesn’t care about her, and Sammy resists taking over the multinational family business, despite his father’s wishes. The two must come to terms with their personal relationships as well as their more practical circumstances, as people are searching for Penny, and Sammy, even with his father’s “expensive lawyers,” is still tied to someone’s death.
Barrett’s story definitely has its share of morbid humor—despite the body in his bed, Sammy is blasé during the detective’s interview: “I think we’re all pretty shaken up by this whole scene,” he says. “So, I can go now?” Lowbrow jokes also pop up on occasion, including a particularly gross scene involving beer that no one should drink. The characters practically burst with personality, especially Penny, Sammy, and Sammy’s co-owners, Mealy and Beer. Penny, who’s lost both her mom and sister, has no friends, and these men offer the camaraderie that she needs. Most of their pranks, even when they cause a ruckus at a deli or a fast-food restaurant, are genuinely funny and not malicious. As much of the bonding between Penny and the crew occurs while they’re painting a house, dialogue-laden scenes are abundant. These are moments for characters to pass the time with games and trading off quips, but the author doesn’t neglect to develop the story as well, as Penny seems to gain a fondness for Mealy, who shows her kindness from the very beginning. All of that dialogue, presented in brief chapters alternating between narrators Penny and Sammy, stokes the brisk narrative pace. The final act effectively wraps up the protagonists’ individual stories, though Penny’s is the more convincing and rewarding of the two. The denouement is a bit of a swerve but unquestionably memorable.
An absorbing tale of friendship that’s endearing as often as it’s unabashedly riotous.Pub Date: April 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781685131821
Page Count: 291
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”
A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.
Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780316258876
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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
© 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.
bookshelf
