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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mesmerizing and moving, March 10, 2002
By A Customer
This novel juxtaposes the lives of narrator and subject in a manner that draws the reader deep into their lives. Although Vietnam is at the core of the story, the gut-wrenching sadness and horror of that experience is woven brilliantly into the stories of the lives of two women who are very different, yet who share a compassion for humanity that is rare and incredibly moving.The settings are created so vividly that it is hard to put this book down. For the first time in a long while,I am left with the urge to re-read very soon. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Impressive, insightful, powerful, November 15, 2001
FOR ROUENNA starts comfortably enough, with the narrator, a novelist, receiving a letter from a woman she barely remembers from childhood. This woman, the Rouenna of the title, pressures the narrator to visit her Brooklyn apartment so they can talk, though the narrator fears the intimacy of a face to face meeting. Eventually, though, they meet, becoming friends despite their differences. Their friendship has barely taken root when Rouenna commits suicide in her mother's house in New Jersey. As the narrator tries to come to terms with the loss, she finds herself writing about Rouenna - her difficult childhood in the projects of Staten Island, and, most compellingly, of her time in war-torn Vietnam as a military nurse. The story becomes a powerful, unsettling eulogy not only for Rouenna, but for the innocence America lost during those turbulent times. This is not a typical Vietnam War novel. Page-wise, the war itself probably takes up no more than a third of the book. By structuring her novel this way, Nunez gives the war context, culturally, historically, and personally, so that its reach goes far beyond its era. You should not miss reading this extraordinary novel.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Women in Vietnam and what happened after; grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shakes you!, September 26, 2010
This review is from: For Rouenna: A Novel (Paperback)
The title "For Rouenna" comes from the kind of inscription authors often write in the flyleaf of a book when asked for an autograph from a reader/fan. The title character, Rouenna Zycinski, was one of those readers, although she admits to the unnamed narrator that she is not really much of a reader. But Rouenna had remembered the narrator from their shared impoverished childhoods in "the projects" of Staten Island. The narrator had gone on to college and became a successful writer, the kind invited by colleges to be a visiting writer-in-residence. Rouenna had gone to nursing school, financed by the army, and then was thrust into the maelstrom that was the Vietnam war as a combat nurse. Reading "For Rouenna" was like being sucked without warning into a whirlpool of events and emotions. It is one of those simply un-put-downable reads. It is also one of the most unique takes on the Vietnam war that I've ever read. And I've read a lot of books about that war - both fiction and memoirs. I know that there are probably a number of books out there from women who served in Nam, but I confess I haven't really read many. Until this book, this fictional treatment of what it might have been like - must have been like. Rouenna is an unforgettable heroine, and an unlikely one. But you quickly learn that the women were just as susceptible to PTSD and the effects of Agent Orange as the male combatants were, because Rouenna finds herself going through "the change" at the young age of 39 - a known effect of exposure to the poisonous dioxins of Orange. As they become reacquainted, she tells the narrator of the excitement and shared military experiences of Vietnam, and how it was probably the best year of her life. Women were a much-desired commodity and in short supply in Vietnam, so Rouenna had made the most of it. There are plenty of flashbacks and stories of Vietnam, but the frame of the story is thirty years later and Rouenna is fifty-ish and fat, an obese size 18, living alone, and knowing she'll probably stay alone, this after years of easy pick-up sex and always thinking that one day she'd be married and have kids. Here's the thing. I'm a guy, and this is a book about women, about friendships between women. And yet it simply pulled me along at a nearly breakneck pace, with a narrative that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shakes you. And shakes your preconceived notions of what it's like to be a woman too. Here's this red-faced, solitary obese woman who most people wouldn't give a second look on the street, and yet she's got this amazing and compelling story, which finally gets told - too late - by our unnamed narrator. For some reason I thought of the closing lines from another favorite book, Mark Harris's classic baseball novel, Bang the Drum Slowly, in which the narrator, Henry 'Author' Wiggen, says of his late friend Bruce, "From here on I rag no one." Rouenna was a person who mattered. Read this book. - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA and BOOKLOVER
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