In this razor-sharp debut, grief and loathing beget a juicy tragicomedy.
One woman juggles the five stages of grief in this novel’s cutting portrait of a marriage’s slow-motion deterioration.
Twenty-nine-year-old, 6-foot-tall Magdalena de la Cruz (nee Jablonowski) mourns the death of her “Polish twin” brother, Junah; they were born 19 months apart, though they were nearly identical. A Northern California viticulturist turned water mogul, Magda begins her story while desperately treading water in the Pacific Ocean after falling overboard. After Junah’s death, she explains, she’s done everything to “rebirth herself”: moving to LA and erasing the many physical similarities she shared with her brother. She’s been Lasiked, Jeuvedermed and Botoxed; pumped with saline, small white pills and gin—everything “short of a corneal transplant.” Yet nothing brings her closer to Ricky, her overcommitted (possibly unfaithful) husband, or to the acceptance of grief, as her psychiatrist advises. Magda agrees to see “the Shrink”—a female therapist “highly recommended by Eric Clapton’s personal assistant”—only because it gives her 45 minutes of alone time with Ricky in rush-hour traffic. As they drive their tanklike Mercedes home from “Lynda Carter’s Hillary for President Beach Bonfire and Benefit in Malibu,” Ricky stops in “the dead middle of Sunset” and violently takes her, as drivers honk, scream and drive around them. Despite the blood, bruising and noise, Magda feels nothing. Instead, she sets out to discover what it’s like to be unfaithful, hooking up with Quentin, a tattooed rock-star wannabe. After the “third worst day” of her life, when she realizes “infidelity wasn’t fun,” Magda returns to her hometown to rediscover the beauty of a place that also smells like cow manure. She seeks solace in art, eventually making a larger-than-life self-portrait out of rhinestones. Prone to embellishment, melodrama and laugh-out-loud set pieces, Magda isn’t an unreliable narrator, even though she admits to being “inconsistent.” Hoida gives her a sure and steady voice, full of caustic wit and raw emotion. With bright similes and shining epigrams, she gleefully mines Tinseltown tropes while skewering class, consumerism and body image. Revelations are punctuated with punch lines that land squarely in the gut. Although the ending is abrupt, it’s as clever as the rest of the book. Best of all, it leaves hope that readers haven’t seen the end of Magda.
In this razor-sharp debut, grief and loathing beget a juicy tragicomedy.Pub Date: June 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0985129439
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Lettered Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A must-own for fans of magic, Steele’s book is a fun peek into the history of magic’s golden age.
Steele assembles the long-lost memoirs of the “Queen of Magic,” a once-famous, nearly forgotten female magician.
Aside from Harry Houdini, few magicians from the golden age of magic have any contemporary name recognition—and any that do are men. Yet around the turn of the 20th century, Adelaide Herrmann held her own as a popular female magician. But because magic’s allure waned as the century wore on, few remember her. Enter Steele, a magician and Herrmann fan, who also performed tributes to the late magician. After acquiring Herrmann’s missing memoir in 2010 after it was discovered in a descendant’s closet, Steele edited it for this publication, a compilation of the memoirs along with an impressive selection of photographs, magazine articles and other ephemera. The memoir itself is compelling—it tells of her early life as a dancer and her falling in love with renowned magician Alexander Herrmann—although Steele notes that Herrmann “wasn’t above occasionally re-casting herself into anecdotes that had originally starred her husband. As much as I adore her, I don’t always trust her.” Alexander received all the attention during his life, and when he died, his nephew Leon briefly took over the act but proved ill-suited for the role. Herrmann next stepped up and made the show her own. She traveled across the United States and Europe, encountering floods and fires and often performing the “bullet catch” trick. It’s a fun story improved by Steele’s peppering the text with photographs to illustrate Herrmann’s text, giving the book the feeling of a well-loved scrapbook. The additional ephemera at the back of the book features writing about Herrmann’s costumes, articles Herrmann wrote for magazines about her job and numerous mentions of her in the press.
A must-own for fans of magic, Steele’s book is a fun peek into the history of magic’s golden age.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1883647216
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Bramble Books
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Intoxicatingly fun; disturbing yet hopeful.
Exuberant, uncensored and wise free verse informed by a benevolent relativism and populated with social outcasts.
Hill’s poems may surface from the depths of a savage city, but savage is hardly the adjective that comes to mind when reading them. Rendered in careful but vibrant language and filtered through Hill’s gently self-deprecating wit, even the grittiest of his poems evince a nonjudgmental candor and a tender concern for human foibles. East St. Louis pervades these poems, not merely as a setting, but as a sort of code, a paradigm and sometimes as a character itself. East St. Louis is the place to find a one-legged prostitute for $10; “a city of immorality and deception / where looking at the wrong woman / can get you killed” and “[taking] one in the leg” is just part of “an ordinary night.” Yet it’s also the place where “taxes are lower” and “people got soul,” where “Glamorous Candy” will pull you into the bathroom and “make life interesting.” Here, you’re part of “a dangerous, exciting, chaotic place.” Hill’s characters are not characters in East St. Louis; they’re characters because of East St. Louis. In fact, amid the scattered topics this collection covers, the one steady theme is the essentialness of context, which Hill explicitly addresses in “Fritangas,” a poem about a Colombian street food, a “beautiful food that comes / with children and dogs and flies / with dirt and smoke / with grease and hoke.” However, when the mayor attempts to clean up the street vendor operations—no “dogs and flies, / no dirt, no smoke, / no grease, no hoke”—the decontextualized fritangas “taste simply awful…clean as a virgin’s kiss.” Comparisons to Bukowski and his dedication to the down-and-out of Los Angeles are inevitable and accurate; Bukowski fans will be hooked immediately. Undeniable, too, is the Beat influence—jazzy rhythms and narrational confessions that echo Gregory Corso, or the long-lined, epic free verse shot through with barely contained eroticism and Eastern religious figures that calls Ginsburg to mind. Hill’s strengths are as varied as his topics. He has the eye and the sensitivity to convey a raw experience without compromise or condescension.
Intoxicatingly fun; disturbing yet hopeful.Pub Date: April 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1448970087
Page Count: 118
Publisher: PublishAmerica
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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