Denver author Hallowell (author of The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn) has created a character study of a fugitive war protestor from the sixties who’s lived a respectable life as a wife, mother and dentist for thirty-four years since the accidental death of a janitor in a Columbia University Vietnam War protest bombing. At the same time, her brother, Adam, is suffering from MS and recurring flashbacks to his time spent fighting in Vietnam. The pacing is considered and careful and the characterizations are believable, but, overall the story was only mildly gripping. Not bad – just not super compelling. Some war violence in the flashbacks. ( )

SHE WAS

Hallowell is a deft craftswoman, and her novel, an absolutely must read, is a masterful braiding of two counterpoint stories: Doreen the passionate anti-Vietnam war Weather Underground activist who plants a bomb that inadvertently kills a man, and her brother Adam, who serves in that war only to prove to their father that he’s not a coward—neither realizing that their choice will have unintended repercussions which will dictate the shape of their lives.
Vietnam wasn’t the front line for freedom, Adam realizes, or the thumb in the dike of communism, or any of that bullshit. Once you’d been in-country for a week or two you realized that in Vietnam there weren’t any fronts. The only reason you had a gun and were humping those hills for gooks was because Command wished it. And the only way you were going to survive it was to do whatever you had to do and stay as high as possible.
The portrait of Adam, who in the war’s aftermath, is a walking casualty (MS ironically renders him mostly immobile), is riveting, and his honoring of the Vietnamese monks who burned themselves in protest against the war is deeply affecting. The contrasting, counterpoint and back-and-forth between these two story lines is a brilliant move, in which we see the horrific and senseless violence of the war which Doreen in her youthful idealism hoped to prevent. The contrast skyrockets after the war when Adam comes out of the closet and lives his homosexuality honestly and openly, while Doreen, who deeply regrets the death she caused, chooses to go underground and live a lie—hiding her true identity and constructing a good citizen’s productive life as a dentist, a life which is as resoundingly false as it is real.
Hallowell is a master of characterization, setting and plot—all those elements with which one builds a novel, and the contrasting counterpoint and reverse parallelism in the book’s structure is more than compelling—this is a book that keeps you up at night, reading on and on! Go get it! ( )