A gentle, poignant tale with nicely developed real and fictional characters.
Caugherty offers a Depression-era coming-of-age novel set amid the beauty of California’s Yosemite National Park.
It’s 1934, and 16-year-old Isabel Dickinson has just finished her second year of high school in San Francisco when a tragic accident takes the life of her young sister, Audrey. Life at home with her mother, in the city’s rough Tenderloin District, had already become unbearable; now, as she struggles with Audrey’s death, she asks her friend Claude DeVille to drive her to Yosemite, where her older brother, James, is working for the Civilian Conservation Corps. She flees one day before dawn, unaware that women aren’t allowed in the Cascades Camp: “She was doing it: leaving Mother, the flat, the San Francisco cold. At long last she was traveling to a beautiful, wondrous place.” After their arrival, Isabel passes out due to an excruciating migraine. She wakes the following morning in a tiny apartment above a post office that belongs to Enid Michael and her husband, Charles. Enid, a delightfully eccentric and bubbly older woman, is Yosemite’s first and, at the time, only female ranger-naturalist, while Charles is Yosemite’s assistant postmaster. At this point, Caugherty seamlessly blends fact and fiction; the Michaels are real-life historical figures, and Enid’s nemesis, Chief Naturalist Bert Harwell, did repeatedly attempt to have her removed from her position for being too unconventional. She’s the perfect mentor for Isabel, who convinces the couple to let her stay with them through the summer, earning her keep by helping Enid with her wildflower garden and typing articles the Michaels write for local publications. As Isabel gradually discovers peace, redemption, and a new life trajectory, readers are treated to a veritable encyclopedia of intriguing and informative details about the flora, fauna, and natural wonders of Yosemite. Caugherty’s love letter to the extraordinary park has a simple plot, but the breezy, conversational prose is engaging, capturing the despair of the Depression and the frustration of women struggling for equality. Isabel is a sturdy, compelling protagonist, but it’s quirky Enid who will linger in readers’ minds.
A gentle, poignant tale with nicely developed real and fictional characters.Pub Date: April 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781685131807
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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