by Christine Candland ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2020
Evocative poems that feel familiar but not mundane.
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A collection of poetry celebrates the awe of everyday moments.
Candland’s book takes quotidian moments and turns them into poetry, from enjoying the blissful hours of quiet before daybreak to knitting with an older neighbor and running an errand in the days when potato chips cost a mere 15 cents. The author recalls a mother and daughter selling candy bars on the subway and how an aunt embroidered her whole life. Candland composes poems honoring legends like Green Man and Lady Godiva. In a piece about Paris, she describes wandering around the City of Light: “Over-washed chalcedony sky, / canaries yellow in tender cages / under market tents, / trade songs with one another.” She explores “vermilion rooms” in Edinburgh’s National Gallery and admires Botticelli’s Simonetta Vespucci, asking the subject, “Are the whispers true that you were in love?” “Summer’s Lament” depicts a mother’s ennui, which sends the family to the beach to drink iced tea from a thermos and grill hot dogs over “tired ashes.” Candland is enamored with the tiniest of details, but she also insists: “Perfection is numbing…it has to be raspy / and needling / and oxidizing / or else how can I feel.” The poet’s imagery is vibrant and engaging. Getting up early for a yoga class, she notes how the “shadows hug buildings” and “cars in opposite lane / form a long searchlight.” There are beautiful bits of wisdom buried in these poems, as when she writes “I wanted to experience life but not be / hurt by it” in “Sand Dunes.” Her questions are universal, as when she visits a kiva and asks: “If I listened hard enough / would the songs handed down by my ancestors / be sung to me.” But some poems hinge on pure description and lack insights. These paint undeniably lovely and memorable scenes from the author’s life, but why does she feel compelled to share them? Readers will long for a few more aha moments.
Evocative poems that feel familiar but not mundane.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-66320-176-8
Page Count: 114
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
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Best Books Of 2022
New York Times Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
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New York Times Bestseller
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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SEEN & HEARD
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