The Hummingbird

Narrators Elyse Mirto and John H. Mayer add liveliness to Kiernan's moving story about healing and redemption. Deborah, an empathetic hospice nurse, is struggling with how to help her combat-wounded husband regain a foothold in their life together, while Barclay Reed, a discredited historian and curmudgeon, is struggling with how to die with dignity. Though the story is told from Deborah's perspective, Mirto's sensitive performance allows each character to grow in the listener's imagination. Her low, almost husky voice reveals a wide range of feeling, from competence to desperation, from passion to fear. At the end of each chapter, Mayer enters to narrate a second, related story. While the connection takes a few chapters to become clear, once it does, Mayer's baritone is a welcome addition. A.S. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

September 1, 2015

Hospice nurse Deborah Birch has been assigned a new patient, retired history professor and World War II expert Barclay Reed, known for his impatience with caregivers. Confident in her abilities, Deborah enters Reed's Lake Oswego, OR, home with the goal of winning him over and easing his final days while also finding escape herself--from her husband, Michael, a sniper back from his third tour of duty in the Middle East and fighting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As Deborah begins to study Reed's unpublished manuscript about a little-known 1942 Japanese mission to drop incendiary bombs into Oregon's forests, she learns more about warfare's effects on soldiers as she struggles to help her husband and save their fractured marriage. VERDICT In this ambitious second novel (after The Curiosity), award-winning journalist Kiernan's talents are spread a bit thin. Deborah's struggle with Michael's PTSD feels surprisingly trite when set against the compelling excerpts of Reed's manuscript about Japanese pilot Ichiro Soga's mission over Oregon and his subsequent peacetime visits. Readers with an interest in World War II would find this content thought provoking, but fans of general contemporary fiction or tales of returning veterans may be less well served. [See Prepub Alert, 6/21/15.]--Jennifer B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2015
A hospice nurse, baffled by her husband's drastic personality change after his third deployment to Iraq, gleans valuable lessons from a dying World War II historian. Deborah Birch, who has found her calling caring for dying patients in Portland, Oregon, is the only attendant retired professor Barclay Reed has not yet fired. She wins him over by showing an interest in his life's work, an unpublished treatise about the only Axis bombing to take place on American soil-in Oregon, when Ichiro Soga, a Japanese pilot, took off from a submarine in a light plane, bent on firebombing the state's famed virgin timber. Chapters from the treatise are interspersed throughout as Deb reads them to Barclay. Afflicted with terminal kidney cancer, Barclay also suffers from the blows life has dealt: his isolation from family and friends after his academic career ended due to a false accusation of plagiarism. Deb has another troubled soul to deal with at home, her husband, Michael, a Guardsman who survived his first two tours of duty in Iraq comparatively unscathed. After the third, however, he returned exhibiting full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder and has grown cold toward his wife and dangerously irascible. A skilled driver and car buff who works as a mechanic, he's now without wheels thanks to a road rage incident-police impounded his car after he pursued and rammed another driver for parking in a handicapped space. When Deb confides in Barclay, he tells her the key to unpacking the puzzle of Michael's trauma may lie in studying the code of a warrior. The story of Soga, a descendant of samurais, and his atonement for the bombing is the key to that understanding. The sections concerning Soga and his odd rapprochement with the Oregon town he attacked are often more engaging than the plights of the contemporary characters. Kiernan (The Curiosity, 2013) seeds this saga with occasional sanctimony, bald symbolism, and overly facile epiphanies. Tackles but ultimately oversimplifies thorny issues.

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September 1, 2015
Kiernan (The Curiosity, 2013) expertly mixes a look at the Japanese role in WWII and a modern-day tale of troubled Iraq War veteran sniper Michael; his hospice-care-nurse wife, Deborah; and her ornery, secret-harboring patient, Barclay. Deborah gets great satisfaction from her work with dying patients, who make her appreciate life while expressing their gratitude to her in touching ways. One former patient carved her a hummingbird. I receive something meaningful from every person, says Deborah. I gain much more than I give. A person who is dying, she says, savors everything and takes nothing for granted, which makes her appreciate being young and healthy. Reed, a wise-but-disgraced former history professor, helps Deborah understand her husband's problems. If you kill a man, he says, whatever the circumstances, he is on your conscience for life. In turn, she asks Reed to think about his answers to four questions: Is there anyone he needs to say I'm sorry, to? Or I forgive you, thank you, or I love you ? This many-faceted, thought-provoking story prompts soul-searching about life, war, and death.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)