A dark and skillful teenage crime novel with plenty of heart.
In Becker’s debut novel, a drug-dealing teen makes a series of bad decisions in 1980s Las Vegas.
As the story begins, 14-year-old Brady Wilks expects to spend his upcoming summer partying and playing Dungeons & Dragons with his next-door neighbor Mick. He also plans to engage in low-level drug dealing at the behest of Mick’s friend Alex, who supplies their neighborhood in suburban Las Vegas. Along the way, he also plans to avoid his own mother, with whom he has a difficult relationship. His summer takes a few unexpected turns, though: For one thing, he meets Cheryl, a recent high school graduate; for another, Alex decides to branch out into heroin, which had previously been part of the boys’ world only when they mourned comedian John Belushi’s recent death. Brady soon becomes infatuated with Cheryl, who thinks he’s several years older than he is, and he has little patience for Alex, whom he doesn’t trust. However, he agrees to provide backup firepower for Alex—wielding guns illicitly borrowed from a shop owned by another friend’s father—at a meetup with cartel members in the Nevada desert. Things don’t go as planned, but Brady doesn’t make a complete break from Mick’s entourage until he’s confronted with a problem that involves someone he truly cares about. He ends the summer with a new awareness of himself, his family, and the difficulty of making the right choices.
This bleak but not entirely hopeless coming-of-age novel offers plenty of elements that will keep readers engaged. The book’s 1980s setting is well developed but handled subtly, without focusing on the references to consumer culture that drive many other period pieces; the only “Tab” in the book, for instance, is Brady’s younger sister. The story exists in a fictional universe that recalls Risky Business and John Hughes movies but draws from a much darker and more nihilistic perspective: “Visible scars mean you’ve been in a fight. The invisible ones keep you in it,” Brady muses after evaluating injuries acquired during one of his many violent confrontations. Brady is a challenging protagonist, and Becker balances his flaws and his vulnerabilities well, keeping readers from giving up on him entirely, even as they watch him make one bad call after another. The narrative also offers him a redemption arc that doesn’t neatly tie up all the novel’s loose ends. Although the frequent scenes of teen drug use may be off-putting to some, they generally feel more documentary than prurient—a manifestation of how Brady and his friends try to assert their independence from adults, who are merely background characters. The prose is solid throughout, with a close first-person narrative that shows events from Brady’s perspective, and it has a straightforward tone that keeps the more dramatic scenes from turning into melodrama. Brady’s tendency to draw life lessons from D&D is endearing without feeling overdone, and it allows the book to take an introspective turn without betraying its 14-year-old perspective.
A dark and skillful teenage crime novel with plenty of heart.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Copywrite, Ink
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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