A disturbing page-turner and a powerful look at American racism.
Vietnamese Americans are sent to concentration camps in this all-too-plausible novel.
The second novel from journalist Nguyen—following New Waves (2020)—starts with an account of Bà Nội, a woman who guides her family out of Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, winding up in the U.S., where her descendants now live. Four of those are the focus of this novel: Jen and Duncan and their older half-siblings, Ursula and Alvin, all of whom share the same absent father. They’re typical young Americans: Jen is an NYU student and Duncan is a teenage football player, while Ursula is a journalist for a BuzzFeed-like news and entertainment site and Alvin is a new Google hire. Their lives are thrown into disarray when a series of airport bombings rocks America; when the people arrested turn out to have Vietnamese surnames, the siblings realize their lives might get much more complicated. The government reacts to the bombings by imprisoning Vietnamese Americans in concentration camps (or “assembly centers,” as the government euphemizes them); Jen and Duncan are taken to one, but Ursula and Alvin get an exemption, possibly because their mother is white. Jen joins an underground resistance movement in the camp, feeding information to Ursula, who gains notice in the journalism world for her reports. This also puts Ursula at odds with some of her colleagues, one of whom writes a breezy “article” titled “These People Are Review-Bombing Detention Camps on Google Maps—And It’s Giving Us Life.” Nguyen’s hand is a bit heavy here, but it’s hard to argue with his pessimistic, and completely justified, view of the American government as a racist oligarchy deeply influenced by nefarious corporations. His narrative pacing is perfect, his dialogue and character development a bit less so; still, this is a compelling read.
A disturbing page-turner and a powerful look at American racism.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593731680
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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