A unique twist on the thriller genre with an appealing side of female empowerment.
The remaining members of a Kennedy-esque family discover that someone is pulling the strings to destroy their credibility—and maybe even their lives.
Every year when April rolls around, Clara Wieland feels like she’s living on the edge of a knife. After all, an inordinate number of her family members, most recently her own parents, have died in freak accidents during that month, a phenomenon that’s come to be known as the Wieland curse. This year, the month coincides with her older brother Teddy’s run for a Senate seat from their home state of Maine. So, when a compromising video of Clara is released on the internet, the timing couldn’t be worse, for Teddy’s campaign or Clara’s fragile mental health. As she hides away to survive the cruel comments of internet trolls, Clara starts having hallucinations of her dead parents. Teddy has little patience for his sister; he’s been caring for her for years, through devastating bouts with an eating disorder and through her grief. But Teddy’s wife, Jess, was Clara’s best friend before they were in-laws, and she’s more apt to listen—so when she, too, is targeted by an internet video that appears to be a deepfake, she believes Clara’s insistence that something else is going on. Maybe it’s the curse; maybe it’s someone with a grudge against the wealthy, powerful Wielands. Either way, Clara and Jess have to look beyond their complicated family/friend relationship to uncover the truth. Clara is a frustrating protagonist at first, since her trauma has led to self-destructive habits that she seems little inclined to face or change, but Sligar renders her with such complexity and compassion that it’s easy to cheer when she begins to figure things out—and when she rejects the convenient trap of the curse narrative, finding power and agency as she learns to trust in her own intelligence.
A unique twist on the thriller genre with an appealing side of female empowerment.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780374282295
Page Count: 400
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.
Hung out to dry by the elders who betrayed them, a squad of pregnant teens fights back with old magic.
Hendrix has a flair for applying inventive hooks to horror, and this book has a good one, chock-full with shades of V.C. Andrews, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Foxfire, to name a few. Our narrator, Neva Craven, is 15 and pregnant, a fate worse than death in the American South circa 1970. She’s taken by force to Wellwood House in Florida, a secretive home for unwed mothers where she’s given the name Fern. She’ll have the baby secretly and give it up for adoption, whether she likes it or not. Under the thumb of the house’s cruel mistress, Miss Wellwood, and complicit Dr. Vincent, Neva forges cautious alliance with her fellow captives—a new friend, Zinnia; budding revolutionary Rose; and young Holly, raped and impregnated by the very family minister slated to adopt her child. All seems lost until the arrival of a mysterious bookmobile and its librarian, Miss Parcae, who gives the girls an actual book of spells titled How To Be a Groovy Witch. There’s glee in seeing the powerless granted some well-deserved payback, but Hendrix never forgets his sweet spot, lacing the story with body horror and unspeakable cruelties that threaten to overwhelm every little victory. In truth, it’s not the paranormal elements that make this blast from the past so terrifying—although one character evolves into a suitably scary antagonist near the end—but the unspeakable, everyday atrocities leveled at children like these. As the girls lose their babies one by one, they soon devote themselves to secreting away Holly and her child. They get some help late in the game but for the most part they’re on their own, trapped between forces of darkness and society’s merciless judgement.
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593548981
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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