A moving story of pursuing one’s goals through pain and loss.
A young musician deals with love, heartbreak, and addiction in DeBellis’ debut novel.
As the story opens in 2017 in Redlands, California, 22-year-old Santiago DeAngelo’s friend Abby Wilson asks him if he’s going to make any New Year’s resolutions. Santiago, a talented musician who’s four years into a five-year architecture degree and plans to apprentice with his successful architect father, tells her he doesn’t need to make any resolutions: “I’m right on track.” But life has other plans: While driving home with his mother, Ana, their car is struck by an SUV, and after a few days, his grief-stricken father decides to take his severely injured wife off life support. The family—father, son, and sister Lucy—is devastated by the loss, which encourages Santiago to lose himself in the fog of his postoperative pain medication. With Lucy’s help, he eventually starts to process his grief, but by that time, he’s also struggling with a Vicodin addiction. He pursues his dream of a music career and starts to find some success; however, he also meets a woman named Kitty Holladay who seems perfectly comfortable feeding his drug habit, which she sees as keeping his music flowing; he thinks that she’s “opened up a portal into a variation of my life where I could be happy,” but his family members think otherwise. The narrative, told in fast-moving chapters, charts Santiago’s rise in the music industry, his unhealthy relationships, and his ongoing drug dependence. His collaboration with Kitty is energizing; when they come up with a future hit song, she tells him, “A product like this is the miracle of pop music.” However, that energy comes at a very high cost.
Over the course of this novel, DeBellis crafts a story of one man’s rise and fall with remarkable empathy and sharp, often lovely prose. Overall, Santiago often comes across as a bit of a puzzle, as his keen intelligence doesn’t seem to allow him to see the damage he’s doing to his own life; the moment when he finally says “I can’t live like this anymore” is likely to strike many readers as coming far too late. However, he’s an unquestionably well-realized character, and the author does a particularly sensitive job of depicting the thorny interplay between him and his father; the latter initially blames Santiago for causing Ana’s death, and things don’t get too much better from there. The book’s most effective plot thread, however, is an interior one: Santiago’s powerful artist’s personality confronting a persistent pill addiction: “I don’t expect you to save me,” he writes to another character while deep in its throes. “I won’t lie and tell you that I’ll never take another pill. But I will say that you're the first person who ever made me feel like I could quit.” The dramatic, shifting tides of faith that others have in the protagonist bring his difficulties into sharp relief, which makes it easy for readers to root for the troubled artist.
A moving story of pursuing one’s goals through pain and loss.Pub Date: June 16, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986167206
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Paradise Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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