A clever assemblage of tales sure to please psychological thriller and suspense fans.
A debut collection of short stories surveys obsessive aspects of human behavior.
Long Island–based author Cannella’s creative volume of eight tales is inspired by the ways people allow specific relationships or situations to fester, then to consume them. Though haphazardly written, the title story is a great example: It chronicles the reality of a reclusive, newly 50, twice-divorced man named Chuck Baber, who laments strangers’ “unconscious rejection” due to his age. Dealing with some “emotional kinks,” he finds trips to a large, nearby laundromat therapeutic and the best chance he has for human connection. Unfortunately, Chuck becomes furious and implausibly vengeful after the dryers damage his new clothes. He hatches a plan to irritate the arrogant owner by washing and drying bowling balls in every machine at once, with disastrous results. The author’s stories range from nearly novella-length yarns, like “A Malevolent Year,” about a college student whose life quickly spirals out of control when he becomes embroiled in a serial killer’s murderous existence, to more condensed tales spanning just a few pages. The shorter pieces include “Harry’s Invisible Box,” which finds a Central Park mime lethally boxed into his own container, and “Death in the Family,” a tale of a dangerously jealous sister. Some stories are more haunting than others, mostly due to the way the writer fleshes out his characters and briskly outlines the precarious and sometimes deadly situations they find themselves embroiled in. Delirious resentment is the extreme that consumes a bedeviled woman in “Donna Gets Her Man,” as the spurned lead character dons a bridal gown to interrupt her daughter’s wedding with what she hopes is her own. Collectively, the tales are wickedly entertaining and, through differing amounts of intensity, deftly illustrate the recklessness and peril of compulsive instability. Interestingly, the racy, explicit, cab driver–narrated closing story, “Hacking Without Martin,” set amid the racially intolerant mayhem of the mid-1960s in New York City, is noted as semiautobiographical. The tale is loosely drawn from Cannella’s own experiences during a time “when racism was undisguised even after the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, and reflects some of my own growth in understanding.” Thankfully, many of these torrid stories stray far enough from the formulaic to remain memorable.
A clever assemblage of tales sure to please psychological thriller and suspense fans.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-70338-080-4
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Random Thoughts Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Flat characters and cultural cliches make for a disappointing read.
Three generations navigate familial relationships and one big family secret.
Rafaela grows up in a palatial house in San Juan, but when her father loses his powerful job in disgrace, she has to leave school and work as a secretary on a military base. When she and her husband move their family to Missouri, their daughter, Ruth, assimilates much more easily than her brother. Ruth’s daughter, Daisy, rejects the upper-middle-class life her mother creates for her in a suburb half an hour away from Manhattan, choosing instead to manage her uncle’s rental properties in Puerto Rico. This novel tells the stories of all three women, shifting in time from the 1950s to the present day. Cummins’ previous novel, American Dirt (2020), was a bestseller, but some critics complained that the author seemed to be writing about Mexican migrants as an outsider looking in. Her depictions of Puerto Rican culture and the lives of her migrant characters here are occasionally more nuanced—colorism and class play significant roles in the plot—but Cummins still indulges in tired tropes. For example, Rafaela’s mother is a black-haired beauty from the countryside who shimmies her hips and claps back at the patrician women who snub her. And the Puerto Rico that Daisy experiences never quite feels like an actual place. On her first visit to her grandmother’s birthplace, Daisy falls in love with Puerto Rico because it’s “just foreign enough to be an adventure and still familiar enough to feel like home.” This would read less like the tagline on a travel brochure if the move from the American suburbs to San Juan had any discernible impact on her as a person. She does almost die in a hurricane, but a natural disaster is not character development. Indeed, none of the characters here emerge as real people. Even the dramatic revelation that animates the novel’s final act fails to provoke much in the way of conflict or change.
Flat characters and cultural cliches make for a disappointing read.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9781250759368
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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