Beautifully written, both sharp and bighearted, funny and true.
A juicy roman à clef sympathetically imagines two young women on opposite sides of an extramarital affair.
"It is 1978 and Mel is twenty-five years old"—and like her creator did at that time, she works at a magazine which seems to be Esquire for a jerk who seems to be Gordon Lish, who recklessly edits the stories of a man who seems to be Raymond Carver. Also like Thurm, Mel is about to have her own first story published in the New Yorker at the age of 25, and she will go on to write "stories mostly in the present tense, mostly about the infinite ways, large and small, in which her characters manage to disappoint one another"—a perfect description of the selection of Thurm's stories written between 1979 and 2021 and just published as Pleasure Palace. And after she endures the events that begin on April 14, 1980, when she finds an angry note from another woman in her husband's backpack, Mel knows that "she will, the instant she’s good and ready, write the only [novel] she’s certain she is capable of writing...she’s already confident of the title: The Blackmailer’s Guide to Love." It turned out to be Thurm's ninth novel, actually, and in addition to evoking the experience of the betrayed young writer, it also fully imagines that of her nemesis. The plight of Julia Myerson unfolds in chapters that alternate with Mel's. Abused as a child, divorced from an awful man, unable to make progress on her dissertation, Julia is cobbling together a living as a dog walker and a caregiver to an elderly couple. After her longtime therapist commits suicide by jumping off a bridge, she becomes the patient of Charlie Fleischer, a caring psychologist with a sweet face, a warm smile—and a wedding ring. "She’s not stupid: she’s fully aware that falling for your therapist is a 'thing,' that it’s something that happens all the time, every day of the week. But that doesn’t render what she feels for Charlie any less meaningful, any less potent, does it?"
Beautifully written, both sharp and bighearted, funny and true.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953002-00-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
Still more brilliant escapism among Kwan’s 1 percenters. Too much is never enough.
Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Or, maybe let’s.
In his second follow-up to the blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, Kwan continues to wrap fairy-tale love stories in glitz, glamour, couture, fine art, and delicious wit. (It’s possible that the author is on a diet because the food component seems slightly less dominant than usual.) This time, our star-crossed lovers are Rufus Gresham, Viscount St. Ives, a man whose beauty has been driving women to distraction since he was photographed in his boxers ironing a dress shirt at age 16, and Eden Tong, a young doctor who lives with her widowed father on the family property at Greshamsbury Hall. Though Rufus has been madly in love and planning to marry Eden since childhood, he is about to run into a solid wall of opposition from his mother, Lady Arabella. Since she and Lord Gresham have managed to drain the family coffers, she is determined to save the family by having each of her three children marry serious money. But right from the start, when an active volcano interrupts the wedding of daughter Augusta to Scandinavian royalty, things don’t go her way. Often hilarious epigraphs and fourth-wall-breaking footnotes include this: “Founded in 1875 in Venice, Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua was also the official supplier of precious fabrics to the Vatican until Pope Paul VI decided to tighten the belt on luxury goods. (This would explain the pillows from Target I saw in the waiting room during my last audience with the Pope.)” One also enjoys the gossip articles, invitations, and menus sprinkled through the text, and the little icons used to signal location changes—Hawaii hibiscus, London Big Ben, Greshamsbury tea set, Houston oil derrick, etc.—are adorable.
Still more brilliant escapism among Kwan’s 1 percenters. Too much is never enough.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780385546294
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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