Sassy, sharp, and very funny, but with a consequential heart.
An artist blurs the line between reality and performance as she livestreams her stalker’s abuses on the eve of an important gallery show.
Sabine is a successful conceptual artist about to debut her newest work, “fifteen photographic portraits of her…covered from head to toe in sheer costumes. These wearable puppets, several feet long…featured silicone faces that Sabine could position over her own.” Titled things like “Crone,” “Baby,” “Stay at Home Mother,” and “Baba Yaga,” the portraits purport to explore the archetypes of female identity as experienced by the individual, and singular, female artist. Or, as Sabine explains it to a collector and the gallery owner, Cecily, “It’s about pretending to be something you already are.” The problem is the show could also be about falsity, or juxtaposition, or “the face and the body and the night,” or any number of other things depending on the viewer. This difficulty with definition, and Sabine’s oscillation between her sense of utter failure and artistic victory, tears at her as she flounders through the pre-opening publicity push wherein her main strategy is to livestream both the bizarre and banal of her everyday in an attempt to “coauthor a work with the public…to start a dialogue with the viewer…in real time.” Throughout it all, Sabine’s beleaguered husband, Constantine; her friend Ruth, whose whale-shaped cakes “occup[y] the intersection between baking and marine life”; and Cecily’s partner, Freya, whose sculptures sell for thousands, attempt to soothe and bolster her ego, with little success. As Sabine’s anxiety ramps up, she's visited by the apparition of feminist art icon Carolee Schneeman, offering protection against the insistent attentions of a stalker who peers in Sabine’s windows with the muddied face of a Rembrandt self-portrait. The whirligig pace of the novel relentlessly intensifies from chapter to chapter as Sabine navigates the boundary between real and manufactured, all in front of a live audience. If Sabine mistakes art for life, or vice versa, the results could be deadly—both for her body of work and her actual body. The book is a pointedly absurdist send-up of the pretensions of the art world, which nevertheless carries at its core a real exploration of what is at stake when one lives for art. Baxter continues her triumphant exploration of real lives lived on the fringes of the surreal.
Sassy, sharp, and very funny, but with a consequential heart.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781646222551
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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