An affecting novel by a literary urbanologist in top form.
A group portrait of Harlem residents in the aftermath of a five-story tenement collapse in 2008 that mysteriously changes the life of a survivor.
Thirty-six hours after the event, workers pull from the rubble 42-year-old Anthony Carter, an unemployed biracial schoolteacher and recovering coke addict. In the days—and daze—that follows, he doesn’t find religion as much as it finds him in the form of a female prophet. Targeting him with her “raging aviary of disembodied howls and shouts,” she helps transform him into an unlikely motivational speaker and media star. But close observers, including young freelance photographer Felix Pearl, find something a bit off about Carter’s inspirational words, like he was “trying and failing to hold on to a rapidly dissolving fragment of a dream.” Police detective Mary Roe, who barely survived a calamitous elevator accident and is now obsessed with finding a missing survivor of the tenement collapse, doesn’t know what to make of Carter. And postal worker Anne Collins, who is instantly drawn to him after they lock gazes across an outdoor event, flees the relationship just as quickly. Price’s first novel since The Whites (2015)—a work of crime fiction written under the pen name Harry Brandt—shows off his usual mastery of urban life, including what a community activist calls “our Death-style,” embodied in the unforgettable image of a kid who “was eating Chinese right before he was shot and the pellets blew the white rice right out through his back.” But the author is mostly in a kinder and gentler mode, affectingly capturing the complicated domestic lives that help people cope in difficult times. For all the darkness in the novel with its 9/11 overtones, there’s a sense of transcendence in the Harlem community’s shared experience and survivors’ spirit.
An affecting novel by a literary urbanologist in top form.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780374168155
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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