Cements Alam’s status as a talented truth-teller willing to tackle tough issues with grace, generosity, and sensitivity.
A billionaire philanthropist’s ambitious young protégé wants her slice of the pie.
Whereas Alam’s previous book, Leave the World Behind (2020)—a National Book Award finalist and the basis for a Netflix film—focused on cataclysmic external threats, his new novel explores a threat from within: ambition. Or maybe that’s not quite right, because the blinding ambition of Alam’s protagonist, Brooke Orr, a Vassar-educated Black woman raised in New York City by a mission-driven white mother, is shaped by the world in which she finds herself and is propelled by its inequities. After years in an unrewarding teaching job at a Bronx charter school, Brooke, 33, takes a job as a program coordinator at 83-year-old white billionaire Asher Jaffee’s charitable foundation and is embraced as his protégé. But once Brooke has been welcomed into Asher’s place of privilege, she believes she is entitled to all it can provide: the designer clothes, the fancy meals, a space to call her own, and, more than anything, the power to change lives, to save souls. As Brooke makes increasingly ill-advised decisions, the tension slowly and compellingly builds toward a dizzying conclusion that feels both surprising and inevitable. Here, as always, Alam’s facility for vividly setting a scene or finding just the right detail or metaphor, his ability to journey inside the minds and emotions of a range of people, and his willingness to unflinchingly and insightfully address issues of race, class, gender, and age are on full display. An exploration of the ways that access or proximity to money can dramatically shift perspective and skew purpose, identity, and behavior, the novel considers a question central to today’s America: If money equals freedom, what does that mean for people who don’t have it?
Cements Alam’s status as a talented truth-teller willing to tackle tough issues with grace, generosity, and sensitivity.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593718469
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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