A distinctive, engaging dual portrayal of wish fulfillment and gritty, hard work from a writer who understands artists.
In New York’s Chinatown, a young painter agrees to line up worthy tenants for her landlady in exchange for free rent, with paradoxical effects on her art.
It’s 2009, with the Great Recession at its height, and 20ish Henriette Truax is finishing up art school, hoping to make new pieces for her own solo show. She faces a problem common to young artists trying to work and become known in New York City, “the art market’s world capital”—it’s hideously expensive. La Ma (short for Landlady Mary; real name Liu Mei Min), a tiny, dryly fierce Cultural Revolution survivor, owns Henriette’s Chinatown apartment house and proposes a deal: lower rent (later renegotiated to a rent holiday) if Henriette recruits suitable tenants. “No white trash. No trash black. No Chinese not legal. Bourgeoisie people,” explains La Ma. Henriette is reluctant, thinking her current neighbors are fine, but two part-time jobs aren’t enough to pay the rent and buy art supplies, so she agrees. Gentrification, though, pushes out Henriette’s quiet neighbors and introduces “an invading, displacing, colonizing force” that actually makes executing her artwork more difficult. In her thoughtful but tough-minded way, Henriette concludes: “Face it: my first duty is to myself, the myself I’m going to make of myself.” Inspired by the image of an abacus, Henriette’s work comes alive, and with La Ma’s patronage, she gains a huge opportunity granted to few young artists. In his debut novel, Harley often employs a somewhat heightened style that works well for the fantasy atmosphere. At one point, Henriette and La Ma’s male “minder” have this exchange: “I have rarely seen dungarees more elegantly modeled.” “In that case, kind sir, vamoose!” The author understands how artists think—visually, not so much in terms of narrative—and he gets how ruthless they must be, especially female ones, to succeed. For example, Henriette rejects her tipsy father’s plea to leave New York and return home (“Pop, you may wallow in eighty-proof self-pity for the rest of your days, but such an old age I find neither attractive nor, much though I have inherited your taste for whisky, even remotely sympathetic”). Harley’s images, too, are sharp and expressive: La Ma’s voice, for example, is “harsh as a raven greeting a chill dawn.”
A distinctive, engaging dual portrayal of wish fulfillment and gritty, hard work from a writer who understands artists.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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