A suite of innovative and emotional dramas depicting an embattled family.
Epstein examines the effect of mental illness on the family unit in this trio of dramatic plays.
The plays follow middle-aged parents Micah and Tess and their adult children: the oldest, exasperated Ava; the middle one, comedian Beezie; and the youngest, the difficult Arky; Arky is a former golden child who has transformed into a combative drinker and drug-user in his 20s. The first play, Mahalo, follows the family’s attempts to deal with Arky after he’s diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder. In Desperados, Tess pressures Micah to put the battered family home on the market, which unleashes a flood of memories of their many years there. In the first scene of the concluding Arky, the family deals with the fallout of Arky leaping out of a moving car on the highway for no apparent reason, leading his parents to wonder if they wouldn’t all be better off if Arky were dead. But Arky doesn’t die: the play leaps forward in time 10 years, and then another 10, sketching out the peculiar life of this troubled man to see where he finally ends up. The plays have postmodern flourishes, with stark staging involving ramps and platforms and precise lighting directions. Characters frequently break the fourth wall, launching into songs or stand-up routines to comment on the action. The format helps to capture the absurdity of mental illness, both for the sufferer and those around him. When Micah tells Tess, nonjudgmentally, that he’d bet she was an alcoholic, Tess responds, “You would? Who cares? We left the planet years ago. We’re out there—just out there in orbit, visiting our boy in Crazyland.” According to the author’s preface, these pieces have never been produced—the reader will be anxious to one day see one or all of these plays staged in a theater. Until then, these pages provide a suitable window into Arky’s Crazyland.
A suite of innovative and emotional dramas depicting an embattled family.Pub Date: July 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781953943354
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Retriever Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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