It’s over almost before you know it, but a haunting solitude blows through these pages, a true intimation of the serene and...
A literature professor muses on his relationship with the earth, in the latest from Native American author Glancy (Trigger Dance, 1990, etc.).
Like the glassy surface of a frozen north woods pond, the narrative is self-contained, quiet, and absolutely unrevealing. The unnamed man of the title teaches a class on the relationship of literature and the environment at the University of Minnesota-Morris, apparently one of the state school system’s more forgotten branches. As he’s driving down a cold highway one day, his car’s radiator overflows, forcing him to pull over and look for help. He’s struck by a sort of eco-epiphany when, without a second’s warning, he feels himself bound to the earth, able to feel it and hear it. Never the most social of guys—he’s the sort of professor whose door is technically always open but whose students find him inaccessible—he withdraws further into his own ruminations. Eager to discover more about the land he now feels linked to, he starts reading up on different disciplines like physics and folklore in an effort to put the flood of information now swamping his senses into some order. Needless to say, this is hardly the stuff of great drama, but Glancy has a beguiling way with her anonymous protagonist. His extreme passivity, even in the face of mounting pressures at work and the declining health of his parents, fits in smoothly with the glacial northern quiet of the setting, “the dark, cold Minnesota night that lasted a thousand years,” even if the parallels between his awakening sensibility and the fragile ecosystem around him are too bluntly drawn.
It’s over almost before you know it, but a haunting solitude blows through these pages, a true intimation of the serene and lonely plains that overcomes some of the rougher, unfinished elements here.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87351-417-3
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
Dizzying and overwrought but salaciously entertaining nonetheless.
Knoll (Luckiest Girl Alive, 2015) turns her cynical eye to sibling rivalry and the twisted—and, in this case, murderous—world of reality TV.
Meet the entrepreneurial ladies of the New York City–based reality show Goal Diggers. Brett Courtney is the youngest cast member. She’s been known to reach for a second doughnut and is committed to convincing the clients of her popular WeSPOKE spinning classes that being skinny is not the key to being healthy. Her engagement to her girlfriend, Arch, is the icing on the reality show cake. Stunning Stephanie Simmons is the only African-American cast member and a bestselling author, but her struggle with depression threatens to hold her back. Juice bar guru and famously vegan Jen Greenberg indulges in secret turkey bacon binges, and dating website creator Lauren Bunn is known as Lauren Fun! Brett’s older sister and business partner, Kelly, a single mother whose 12-year-old daughter is a showstopper, is the new cast member and is everything that Brett has never been: thin, beautiful, and, as far as Brett is concerned, always their parents' favored daughter. Executive producer Jesse Barnes turns the screws and showrunner Lisa Griffin cracks the whip as Brett and Stephanie detail the production of Season 4 in alternating first-person narratives. Opening and closing the book (and sprinkled a few times in between) are sections narrated by Kelly in which she sits down with Jesse for on-camera interviews in the aftermath of Brett's death, but the truth of how Brett died isn’t revealed until the final act. Knoll explores the pressure society places on women to be everything to everyone and do it all without a strand of hair out of place. There’s enough conniving, scandal, and snark to rival the most shocking episodes of Real Housewives, and these cutthroat divas play to win even if it means blurring the line between truth and lies. In the end, murder seems inevitable. Season 4 will end with a bang, and there will be blood.
Dizzying and overwrought but salaciously entertaining nonetheless.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5319-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Intricate plotting and courtroom theatrics, combined with moving insight into parenting special needs children and the...
A Byzantine web of lies surrounds a fatal fire at an unusual treatment facility in this taut legal drama.
Kim, a former trial lawyer who turns 50 the same week her debut novel is published, does not make it easy on the reviewer charged with describing her book. This is a complicated and unusual story—though when you are reading it, it will all seem smooth as silk. The Yoos, an immigrant family from Korea, own a hyperbaric oxygen therapy tank in a town called Miracle Creek, Virginia. (In a characteristically wry aside, we learn that "Miracle Creek didn't look like a place where miracles took place, unless you counted the miracle of people living there for years without going insane from boredom.") HBOT treatment, which involves sitting in a chamber breathing pure, pressurized oxygen, is believed to be effective in remediating autism and male infertility, and those conditions are what define the group of people who are in the "submarine" when a fire, clearly set by an arsonist, causes it to explode. Two people are killed; others survive paralyzed or with amputations. The novel opens as the murder trial of the mother of a boy who died in the fire begins. As we come to understand the pressures she has been under as the single mother of a special needs child, it does not seem out of the question that she is responsible. But with all the other characters lying so desperately about what they were doing that evening, it can't be as simple as that. With so many complications and loose ends, one of the miracles of the novel is that the author ties it all together and arrives at a deeply satisfying—though not easy or sentimental—ending.
Intricate plotting and courtroom theatrics, combined with moving insight into parenting special needs children and the psychology of immigrants, make this book both a learning experience and a page-turner. Should be huge.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-15602-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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