Not every character in the collection is memorable, but their fates make an impression.
Biswas offers a collection of macabre literary short stories.
This often-morbid book is rife with tales of death, loss, and murder. In the first story, “A Sea Voyage,” the captain of a ship seems to have lost his mind during a storm, and one of the crew jumps into the sea “like a lemming” for no apparent reason. It becomes clear that “these are not seasoned professionals delicately guiding the ship through changing waters.” In “Blister,” set in 19th-century Scotland, a sailor named Paul Neville is bound for Australia, only to perish during the journey; Paul’s widow, Sarah, is left with both emotional and physical damage. “Swimming in the Ocean Is Wrong” features a husband who steals a high-end bathing suit for his wife. It seems like a largely inconsequential crime—until the action moves to the beach. “Rhonda’s Story” takes readers to Corpus Christi, Texas, in the year 1892, where a man is convicted and executed for the murder of a sex worker. Years later, the man’s daughter also winds up in a violent situation and receives a harsh punishment as a result. “Richard Court: The Priest, the Sinner” describes, in a few short pages, a lengthy novel about sex work and suicide. The stories tend to be no more than a few pages long; in those pages, readers can never be quite sure what violence will befall the characters. People are dispatched in an assortment of ways, whether they’re “succumbing to an endless sleep” (“The Town That Went to Sleep”) or shot by a commanding officer (“Julie’s Murderer”). The excitement stems from seeing what trouble each tale will bring. There isn’t always a lot of depth to each character, however; both Paul and Sarah in “Blister” are fairly bland (Sarah is said to be beautiful, but there’s not much about her that makes her stand out). Still, each story compellingly puts its characters in tough spots that prove to be both gloomy and unexpected.
Not every character in the collection is memorable, but their fates make an impression.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9798987625903
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Obie Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.
A free-spirited woman forges a career as a writer and journalist, risking scandal and war zones to follow her heart.
Allende’s latest opens in San Francisco in 1873, introducing Emilia at age 7, the illegitimate daughter of Molly Walsh, who, as a novice nun, was seduced and abandoned by wealthy Chilean Gonzalo Andrés del Valle. Molly goes on to a successful marriage, Emilia grows up with a loving stepfather, and at 17 she begins writing, then publishing, sensational dime novels under the pseudonym Brandon J. Price. By 23, she’s a journalist with a column in The Daily Examiner, though still forced to hide her gender behind her pen name. Rule breaking is in her nature, and while she accepts, for now, lower pay than men, she decides on a trip to New York to take a lover and learns to control her own contraception. Later, finally writing under her own name, she’s commissioned to go to Chile and cover its civil war from a human angle, accompanied by colleague and friend Eric Whelan, whose focus is the military aspect. Chilean revolutionary politics make for less sprightly reading, but Emilia’s individual encounters with members of high and low society lend atmosphere. These include the president, a great aunt, and eventually her father—now alone, regretful, and mortally ill. Although he disapproves of working women, the two share a “desire to see the world and experience everything intensely,” and when he offers to recognize Emilia as his legitimate child, she accepts. Now the story gathers pace, with Emilia—always and predictably the rebel—witnessing the horrors of battle, discovering that she and Eric are in love, and getting arrested. Not quite plausibly, she instigates a further sequence of impulsive moves before the story is permitted to conclude.
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593975091
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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