There is something essentially inexplicable about a woman who wants to implode a largely faultless life, but Britt doesn’t...
A happily married real estate agent contemplates having an affair.
Tessa, at 37, has a lovely life in Montreal: three sons, an “irresistible” and creative husband, and a financially comfortable life. When one of Tessa’s female clients needs to sell a home due to an impending divorce, Tessa doesn’t realize that the home belongs to her first great love, Francis—until he calls and asks her to meet him for a drink. Immediately, Tessa knows she will meet him, and she expects to return to the state of desire that has simmered underneath her contented life ever since the end of their relationship more than 15 years earlier. The novel unspools forward and backward in time as Tessa narrates her childhood, adolescence, and relationship with Francis in the past and inches forward through the quotidian life of mothering and domesticity as she waits for her meeting with Francis. Britt (Louis Undercover, 2017, etc.) is covering familiar ground, but luckily, the novel is smarter than the average exploration of middle-class ennui. For one thing, Tessa is a protagonist who defies expectations; she’s failed at the creative career she wanted, but she doesn’t appear to resent it. She’s an excellent mother but views the complex reality of parenting with clarity. She’s self-aware about the dark streak she’s carried her whole life—“I was nothing but love and torment,” she says—but this darkness hasn’t threatened to poison her relationships...until now. While the reader is likely rooting for Tessa to keep her family intact, Britt also reminds us, in spare and trenchant prose: “To each her own end of the world.”
There is something essentially inexplicable about a woman who wants to implode a largely faultless life, but Britt doesn’t shy away from exploring this impulse anyway, with memorably lovely results.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4870-0238-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Arachnide/House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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