An unhurried evaluation of the importance of companionship and friendship at any age.
Three lonely older women from Brooklyn form an unlikely friendship and tackle difficult life moments together.
The book opens as 60-year-old Gertie Sundersen chokes on a plum. Corinna Hale happens to be standing nearby and rushes to help, but due to a rare genetic condition, she is too small to effectively perform the Heimlich on someone of Gertie’s stature. Corinna implores Maria Benedetti, another bystander, to help. After the women successfully rescue Gertie from impending doom, the trio meanders to a bench overlooking the Verrazzano Bridge. As they sit and take in the magnificent view, they begin to share secrets with each other: Gertie is a divorced former athlete, Maria is a lovelorn Italian widow, and Corinna, who's never been married, dabbles in recreational drugs. The one common denominator is that each woman is very much alone. They end up enjoying each other’s company so much that they begin meeting weekly at their bench at the bridge. Over time, the friendship they share becomes the most important aspect of each woman’s life. Unfortunately, after two decades of bonding, Maria decides to go digging into Gertie’s and Corinna’s pasts, unintentionally threatening the very relationships that have come to mean the most to her. The story joins the three friends when they get together and also follows the women through various aspects of their individual lives. The story moves along rather drowsily, with long stretches between significant events and disproportionate focus on moments that do not advance the narrative. The strength of the novel comes in quiet moments when each of the main characters is able to engage in personal reflection about the life she has lived and what she hopes to do with her remaining time. The Verrazzano Bridge is also a central fixture of the story, one that essentially becomes its own character as the tale unfolds. Although the narrative veers off track at a few points and would have benefitted from the fleshing out of intriguing subplots, the insightful commentary on growing older should be sufficient to keep some readers engrossed.
An unhurried evaluation of the importance of companionship and friendship at any age.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2722-9
Page Count: 241
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
A quiet and poignant debut from a writer to watch.
An Indigenous family is forever changed after one of their own goes missing.
Peters’ debut novel explores the lives of a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia as they grapple with their decades-old trauma. In 1962, Ruthie, the family’s youngest daughter, goes missing from the berry farm in Maine where they work every summer. Told from alternating perspectives, the novel follows Joe, Ruthie’s older brother and the last person to see her before she went missing, and Norma, a young girl living in Maine with an aloof father and overbearing mother. Lying on his deathbed, Joe thinks back on his life, which has been filled with grief, rage, and all-consuming guilt: “People have given me their time, their love, their bodies, their secrets. And I’ve given so little.” After a brutal act of violence, Joe spent the next few decades running from himself and his sins, so as not to inflict more harm onto the ones he loves the most. Meanwhile, Norma recounts her life, which was plagued by a different kind of guilt, one that caused her to always be the dutiful daughter—the daughter who didn’t ask too many questions, ignored the lack of baby pictures, and chose to forget the vivid and painful dreams that plagued her childhood (“Each time I woke, I grieved for the woman cloaked in darkness and I tried to call out to her”). Eventually, Norma goes to college, becomes a teacher, and falls in love—and she spends the next few decades finding a way to live with the unsettling feeling that something isn’t quite right with her life. As Norma’s true identity is barely concealed, the novel is less concerned with maintaining a mystery than with exploring how brutality ripples out, touching everything and everyone in its wake. Peters beautifully explores loss, grief, hope, and the invisible tether that keeps families intact even when they are ripped apart.
A quiet and poignant debut from a writer to watch.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781646221950
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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