A bracing look at a breakdown that’s sometimes difficult to read but always completely captivating.
A 35-year-old woman obsesses over social media and her ex-boyfriend as her life implodes.
Jenny McLaine is having a rough time. She and Art, her photographer boyfriend of seven years, just broke up. Her job at the Foof, a feminist online magazine, is on the rocks. Her roommates are moving out and her tarot card–loving medium mother is moving in. Her life doesn’t seem as flawless as those of the women she idolizes on social media, but that doesn’t mean she won’t spend an alarming amount of time trying to make things look picture perfect. She even scrolls through her phone during sex—in her defense, it was “a slow bit.” At one point, Jenny panics to the point of tears as she attempts to make an Instagram post about a croissant—should there be a hashtag? an exclamation point?—before throwing the croissant itself into the garbage (an apt metaphor for the amount of attention Jenny pays to her online life versus her real one). It’s easy to sympathize with Jenny’s put-upon single-mom friend, Kelly, who’s annoyed with Jenny’s self-obsessiveness and social media fixation. Through script dialogue, email drafts, and texts along with prose, Unsworth (who also writes for television) gives an up-close and personal view of Jenny’s gradual breakdown as her life falls apart. Although Jenny's constant need to filter every life experience through social media often feels exhausting, there’s no denying that her obsession will resonate with many millennials. Jenny’s voice is strong, sharp, occasionally disgusting, and alternately charming and horrifying as she narrates every one of her stumbles through life.
A bracing look at a breakdown that’s sometimes difficult to read but always completely captivating.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-4193-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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