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MAN V. NATURE

STORIES

Cook’s sharply honed prose packs an intellectual yet disturbing wallop. Be forewarned: Reading too many of these stories in...

Cook, who has worked on the radio show This American Life, debuts with 12 mercilessly in-your-face stories.

Many exist in a parallel universe where nature and/or society has become a menacing force. A woman living in a prisonlike “shelter for widows and other unwanteds” narrates the only moderately horrifying opening story, “Moving On.” Her Placement Team finds her a new husband once she starts following their rules for erasing memories of her past. The second story, “The Way the End of Days Should Be,” plunges into an apocalyptic world where floodwaters rise unstoppably. No escape is possible in “It’s Coming,” either, though the menace here remains unnamed and therefore even more frightening. Both stories have victims/protagonists whose wealth and authority, not to mention careful preparations, prove useless. Water returns as a prime enemy, at least initially, in the title story about three men whose fishing vacation and friendships go horribly wrong when they can’t find the supposedly nearby lakeshore. People’s need for connection continually gets trampled. Dangerously needy crowds collect like moths around the flame of a young woman’s good fortune in “The Mast Year.” “Somebody’s Baby” and “Marrying Up” evince primal maternal fears. In the former, a man steals babies whenever mothers let their guards down; in the latter, a woman’s healthy baby and husband brutalize her.  In “A Wanted Man,” about loneliness more than sex, a man who can impregnate 50 women in a day is reminiscent of a TV Western gunslinger—admired, envied and marked by those who want to replace him. The erotic nature of teen friendship reaches demented lengths in “Girl on Girl.” The strongest, relatively most realistic and hopeful story, “Meteorologist Dave Santana,” follows a sexually predatory woman who stalks her neighbor for years while lying to herself that all she cares about is the chase.

Cook’s sharply honed prose packs an intellectual yet disturbing wallop. Be forewarned: Reading too many of these stories in one sitting may cause suicidal thoughts.

Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-06-233310-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

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NORMAL PEOPLE

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2019


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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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