A caustic yet charming snapshot of contemporary digital life.
The lives of a struggling millennial astrologer and one of her Gen X fans intersect in a shocking way.
Emily Forrest operates the uber-popular Instagram astrology account Exalted, but in real life, her rent isn’t paid and she lives on blue Gatorade, turkey slices, saltines, and as much weed as she can scam from her clueless ex-boyfriend Thomas, all the while obsessed with the mysterious Beau Rubidoux, a photographer with a perfectly exalted chart—“placements where the sign can achieve its highest potential.” Emily insists astrology is a scam, merely generalizations designed to flatter us, and yet she still falls prey to its allure. “The thing is: I have a Gemini moon, and that allows me to hold two contradictory ideas at once,” she says. Dawn is a down-and-out Gen Xer with borderline personality disorder and a regrettable tendency to send horrible texts to ex-girlfriends and her estranged son whenever she drinks. Their paths first cross when Dawn pays Emily to read her astrology chart. Both women are living the opposite of exalted lives: lonely, broke, and self-loathing, if for somewhat different reasons. Emily lies to her friends and family so they’ll like her more; Dawn has sabotaged every relationship in her life by saying the most awful things possible. Luckily, their sharp humor and self-awareness save them from being insufferable even as they say and do terrible things. Like the planets of the zodiac, the two women orbit each other, leading to a toe-curlingly awkward finale that’s as funny as it is cringeworthy. Ultimately, this is a story about seeking—money, fame, fate, and most importantly, human connection; with prose as delightfully moody as its heroines, it's cynical yet strangely uplifting.
A caustic yet charming snapshot of contemporary digital life.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-951213-48-0
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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