A colorful topography of mostly LGBT–related outings, forays, and adventures.
Drag performers, detectives, and community moguls meet in Burch’s (The Homeport Journals, 2015, etc.) collection, which features coming-out stories with a twist.
All the stories in this collection have the feel of cautionary tales. The first, “Private Quarters,” features a young college student named Matt Atwood, who lives in a thin-walled, three-ring circus of an apartment building. There, he befriends Sandy, a somewhat ghastly, sallow-cheeked, and overly friendly woman who’s always luring him into her apartment with gossip and cocktails. Matt expresses some disgust for the women in his life, à la Philip Roth, as he navigates the expectations of Sandy and his own buttoned-up girlfriend, Claire. This tale, with its unmistakable fascination for people’s secret lives, sets the tone for subsequent stories in the collection. In another, an elderly woman, who lives with her abusive brother, throws a seriously awkward dinner party featuring a ragtag cast of disgruntled characters; most of the stories feature somewhat-older, somewhat-closeted gay men and their faithful female friends, who vary in description from resplendent to monstrous. The most memorable and formidable story in this collection, “Last Chance,” tells of a budding affair between a closeted male detective and an elegant murder suspect in the Bahamas. Over the course of several interrogations (including some in the form of fancy dinners, served by attentive young men), these two find that they have more in common than just the case at hand. This collection tries to get at the core of what it feels like to be in the closet and addresses the doubts and reticence that come with taking the first steps out. Even stories that address other themes still include key divulgences; in “The Honoree,” for example, a corrupt school dean’s sins catch up with her after skirting the law for years, and in “Götterdämmerung,” a musician shares the performance of a lifetime with his grandfather-in-law, a renowned maestro. Overall, Burch weaves a collection of crackerjack plot twists in which unlikely heroes seize the day.
A colorful topography of mostly LGBT–related outings, forays, and adventures.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: HomePort Press
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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