With a fearless voice and a diverse array of characters, Dennis’ debut delivers strong prose but tips toward the overly...
Dark, visceral, and wide-ranging, Dennis' debut collection delves into the humanity and pain of highly flawed characters.
In the title story, a young man in prison on a drug charge develops an intimate yet violent relationship with his cellmate. A widowed woman with a self-destructive streak finds herself on a yacht off the coast of Mexico outrunning a tsunami in "In the Martian Summer." "The Book-Eating Ceremony" follows a jaded lesbian academic with a deep resentment for her girlfriend (and her girlfriend’s gaggle of dogs) as she attempts to write a book about misogynist gynecologist Albert H. Decker while grieving her mother and obsessively pining for another woman. In "Nettles," a husband buys a slaughterhouse and moves his family out of the city only for tensions to boil over with his wife and with the religious neighbors he bought it from. "This Is a Galaxy" tracks the son of a gay Turkish immigrant who finds himself violently orphaned and working in a butcher shop. One story, "In Motel Rooms," is told from the point of view of Coretta Scott King, hounded by the FBI and carrying the burdens not only of the Jim Crow South, but of family duties and activist organizing as her husband has an affair. While King is written with more empathy and care than the other female characters in the book, it can be argued that Dennis, a white man, is not the person who should be telling the story of a black woman’s domestic pain. The stories in this collection are often bloody, brutal, and sad. The protagonists’ hopelessness (and the author’s inclination toward the grisly) is clear in one character’s observation that “it felt as if every animal were designed to be disassembled.” The relationships are dysfunctional and the interior lives of the characters scalding, the sex brutal, and the trauma acute. Dark corners of complicated people are on full display.
With a fearless voice and a diverse array of characters, Dennis’ debut delivers strong prose but tips toward the overly morbid.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64129-036-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
