Funny, original, worldly, and very cool. A standout.
A 21-year-old Polish woman wins the immigration lottery, then keeps getting lucky.
As this unusual caper novel opens, our narrator, Viva—new to Los Angeles after a failed attempt to start her American life in Chicago—picks up a woman hitchhiking in a green cocktail dress on the 101. Bobby Sleeper turns out to be from Poland, too, though from a much wealthier and more cosmopolitan background. “At any given moment, half the population of LA is giving therapy to the other half,” Bobby informs Viva when she takes her out to lunch in gratitude for the ride. “Fifty percent of LA is depressed. Only five percent of Bhutan is. You ever been here?…The hamachi salad’s yummy.” Later that day, Viva takes a position as live-in personal assistant to Bobby and her rich, hot husband, Sebastian Sleeper, a retired film director. Along with the couple’s acerbic gay housemate, Lance, the group will engage in the daily custom of “spritzatura”—a Spritz Veneziano in the hot tub at dusk. One of many amusing aspects of Zyzak’s tale is its perspective; though the action occurs in 2018, it’s narrated from 2079, when Viva is 84, allowing for clever asides about how things “used to be” in our current time. Zyzak does an amazing job with Viva’s narration—because her English is not perfect, her understanding of the hyperarticulate Bobby runs a little behind the reader’s, though Viva has some insights she withholds until the very end (and a fine ending it is). The caper that sends the plot into overdrive involves The Lady Waiting, a (fictional) Vermeer painting stolen in a 2009 Berlin museum heist. Two of Bobby’s ex-husbands and Bobby herself have become involved in a scheme to return it for the huge reward, $50,000 of which can be Viva’s if she helps out. With its madcap plot, fantastic central characters, and White Lotus–style wealth porn (the kind where a character eats caviar off the kitchen floor after the jar falls out of the fridge), screenwriter Zyzak’s second novel seems like catnip for Hollywood.
Funny, original, worldly, and very cool. A standout.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593542941
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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