In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.
An older woman and a younger man struggle to grasp who they are to each other in a slippery and penetrating tale.
This elegant knife of a story begins at a mundane restaurant in Manhattan's financial district, which the narrator hesitates to enter. Inside, she orders two gin and tonics over a strained lunch encounter with Xavier, who has said he believes he might be her son. The narrator is an actress of some renown rehearsing a difficult new play called The Opposite Shore. It isn’t going well, and the actress realizes it falls to her to reconcile two impossible halves in its structure. As she fights through her dread, the novel launches Part II months later in the same restaurant, where Xavier and the actress are joined by her husband, Tomas, who toasts “the extraordinary success of the play.” In this jarring reset, the trio is now a family, the play is now called The Rivers, and the novel is mirroring the irreconcilable halves the narrator sought to resolve on stage with her body and her art. Kitamura rewards close readers of this through-the-looking-glass disruption. So much glints below the surface in her purring, pared-down sentences. When Xavier introduces his girlfriend, “Tomas took her hand in his, his smile already an embarrassment to us both.” Kitamura’s great theme, explored via two other nameless female narrators in A Separation (2017) and Intimacies (2021), is the unknowability of others. This novel posits that even within a family, each member is constantly auditioning. As the tension mounts, and the narrator’s interpretation of events coils back and multiplies, she wonders “what was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?” Over the shards of this realization, the shaken narrator and Xavier find “the possibility remained—not of a reconciliation, but of a reconstitution.” The book ends as another play begins.
In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593852323
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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