An intense, unflinching, and supernatural coming-of-age tale.
When Leisl Davis begins her first year at Smith College, she gets a spot in a competitive seminar on the history of witchcraft that turns out to be more practical than she could have ever imagined.
Leisl isn’t doing so well when she moves into her dorm at Smith. She battles with suicidal tendencies and self-loathing and is trying desperately to convince herself that she isn’t attracted to girls. She meets a friendly, handsome Amherst student named Tripp, but when he rapes her, she is denied support or even validation from school or the authorities. Leisl befriends Luna, another of Tripp’s victims, and immediately feels an attraction. They sign up for a seminar led by the enigmatic professor Sienna Weiss, who whittles the course down to Liesl, Luna, and two other girls, Gabi and Charlotte. Sienna reveals to the students that they are not a class, they are a coven, and under her guidance they learn how to perform real magic. They progress quickly, but their bond is complicated when Luna and Gabi start dating and Leisl cannot contain her jealousy, nor her untreated PTSD. When the coven learns that Tripp and his Amherst frat buddies have somehow developed magical powers of their own, Leisl drives the coven to take justice into their own hands. This debut is a bit rough around the edges but is often quite brilliant, particularly when Leisl reflects on the ways women and girls are demonized simply for protecting themselves: “might you see that, in order to be safe in houses of God, much less the untamed wild of streets and bars, we must grow snakes from our scalps and learn to turn men to stone—just to go outside?” Harlowe writes Leisl’s point of view in rushing, furious sentences, depicting her increasingly fraught mental state while also leaving room for friendship, love, and healing in the slightly uneven ending.
An intense, unflinching, and supernatural coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5220-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.
After a loss, a young British woman from a Ghanaian family reassesses her responsibilities.
Her name is Maddie, but the young protagonist in George’s engaging coming-of-age novel has always been known to her family as Maame, meaning woman. On the surface, this nickname is praise for Maddie’s reliability. Though she’s only 25, she works full time at a London publishing house and cares for her father, who’s in the late stages of Parkinson’s disease. Maddie’s older brother, James, has little interest in helping out, and their mother is living in Ghana and running the business she inherited from her own father. When she needs money, she always calls Maddie, who shoulders these expectations and burdens without complaint, never telling her friends about her frustrations: “We’re Ghanaian, so we do things differently” is an idea that's ingrained in her. Her only confidant is Google, to whom she types desperate questions and gets only moderately helpful responses. (Google does not truly understand the demands of a religious yet remote African-born mother.) But when Maddie loses her job and tragedy strikes, she begins to question the limits of family duty and wonders what sort of life she can create for herself. With a light but firm touch, George illustrates the casual racism a young Black woman can face in the British (or American) workplace and how cultural barriers can stand in the way of aspects of contemporary life such as understanding and treating depression. She examines Maddie’s awkward steps toward adulthood and its messy stew of responsibility, love, and sex with insight and compassion. The key to writing a memorable bildungsroman is creating an unforgettable character, and George has fashioned an appealing hero here: You can’t help but root for Maddie’s emancipation. Funny, awkward, and sometimes painful, her blossoming is a real delight to witness.
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-2502-8252-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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