A fresh collection marred by its author's insistence on provocation.
A collection of inventive stories about queer life that is often too edgy for its own good.
Peck (Night Soil, 2018, etc.) returns with his first story collection, with tales that circle around questions of belonging, entrapment, violence, and the frustrated desire for intimacy. Most often Peck trains his attention on relationships between queer men, most of which are laced with melancholy if not outright misanthropy. In "The Law of Diminishing Returns," an American writer who's decamped to London struggles to attain intimacy when all he seems to attract are men who don't want to be in relationships with him. "I was one of those things that can be used only once," he worries. "People like Derek, I thought...they were able to have boyfriends and still find the time for trysts...whereas it was all I could manage to be someone's someone else." In the hilarious "Sky Writing," a man boards a flight and tells a college student sitting next to him the story of his doomed relationship with a wealthy capitalist, whose love requires him to travel around the world interminably; meanwhile, he pursues potential romance with a flight attendant. "Bliss" finds a young man sheltering the thug who murdered his mother, for reasons that no one—not even the man himself—can make sense of. Stories like these find Peck in fine, counterintuitive form, spinning fiction from the most unlikely and captivating premises, writing in a mode that rides the line between horror and erotica. When he allows himself to step out of his self-fashioned quirkiness the stories attain a level of emotional honesty that stuns. However, Peck too often falls prey to his own impulses toward provocation, resulting in stories that nauseate without much intellectual payoff. In "Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore," a 5-year-old fixates on a teen boy in terms that are explicitly sexualized. Peck handles the subject more for laughs than thought, and the result is a story that plays into dangerous stereotypes about gay men. The collection's final two stories, "Summer Beam" parts one and two, end in a disgusting incident of misogynist violence that haunts, but only because it feels willfully mean-spirited and poorly plotted.
A fresh collection marred by its author's insistence on provocation.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64129-082-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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