Despite Ball’s mordant humor, the pain here feels all too real.
Ball’s mixture of satire and domestic drama turns contemporary suburban life into a frightening dystopia of “material leisure and emotional poverty.”
The satiric element centers around the Petra School, a private “temple of education” in upscale Somerset, Connecticut. Headmistress Agnes seems warm and charismatic if a bit eccentric at first, but her dictatorial creepiness becomes apparent, both in the increasingly strident school bulletins she sends—linking dairy and dyslexia, warning against (pre-Covid era) vaccinations, banning any mention of Jewish holidays—and as she exerts personal control over both students and parents. Starting on New Year’s Eve 2013, Ball follows several of those parents and potential parents as three marriages begin to tailspin into crisis. Current Petra parents Virginia and Tripp are keeping huge secrets from each other: Novelist Virginia has cancer, while financially strapped Tripp has built a survivalist arsenal in the basement. Virginia’s old friend Rachel and her Swedish architect husband, Gunter, have recently arrived from Manhattan and enrolled their kids at Petra. Initially Rachel, though Jewish, is so desperate to fit in that she ignores hints of Agnes’ antisemitism, but Gunter is dismissive of Petra (and suburbia and America in general). Then Agnes begins to woo him. Margo, a compulsive cleaner and stay-at-home mother of three sons, has never recovered emotionally from the death of an infant daughter. Now a fanatic follower of Agnes’ Wednesday evening meditation sessions, Margo wants to switch her boys from public school to Petra despite objections from the kids and her overworked husband, Richard, a devoted father, pothead, and online porn addict. Once readers are drawn into these stories, Ball leaps into a broad rhetorical section, describing from a third-person plural viewpoint all the ways suburban men and women, as well as their children, are miserable. Certainly the kids Ball introduces are unhappy. Virginia and Tripp’s daughter is burdened by her parents’ secrets. Petra turns Rachel’s 6-year-old son into an outcast. Richard and Margo’s three sons stand by helplessly watching their parents’ mental health deteriorate.
Despite Ball’s mordant humor, the pain here feels all too real.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5888-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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