A sumptuous feast for the eyes and the mind.
A Brooklyn-based artist and new mother’s harrowing hike in upstate New York frames a wide-ranging reflection on art and the artist’s life.
In this graphic novel from painter Heffernan, we meet Julie, with infant Sam strapped to her chest, making her way through a lush forest extending to the horizon. The landscape’s myriad greens and multitudinous life awe her and, feeling small under the setting sun, Julie wonders, “What’m I doing here?” The book answers this question in senses big and small, alternating between the increasingly off-course hike and Julie’s background as the youngest member of a conservative religious family, first in small-town Illinois and then in the suburban sprawl of the San Francisco Bay Area. Chronic bed-wetting leads to shame and distressing medical intervention for Julie, anchoring her narration in the corporeal. The female body suffers—when the young Julie squirms under her father’s judging gaze, or when a friend’s excitement at seeing the Beatles provokes savage punishment from the friend’s father for perceived carnality—but is also celebrated, as menstrual rags make their way into fine art, and Sam’s nursing from Julie's hot breasts brings calm to the lost mother. Julie majors in art; travels Europe with a nasty boy; paints in West Berlin with writer Jonathan, her eventual husband and Sam's father; gets a New York agent who screws her over; and rivetingly explains her artistic motivations in stream-of-consciousness narration that is both erudite and amiable. Classic works of art, their secrets deciphered by Julie’s exuberant annotation, punctuate the muted tones and soft lines of the storyline panels, while the author’s own vibrant, ornate paintings occasionally explode the page with fecund portraits of humans and hivelike homes. Heffernan takes her time laying out the narrative threads, then lets them echo through one another, painting the rich web of one woman's life.
A sumptuous feast for the eyes and the mind.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781643755595
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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