A wonderfully claustrophobic tale of obsession and self-delusion.
In Hanson’s debut novel, a lifelong Hollywood obsessive hires a duplicitous caregiver.
Dorothy Anderson was a sickly child from a religious family who found solace in movie theaters. She moved out to Hollywood in the mid-1940s and married into the prominent Fiske family, who set her up with a house in the Pacific Palisades and provided access to some of Dorothy’s idols, including Judy Garland. Now, in 2006, the widowed, childless Dorothy is 83 and more than a little obsessed with her neighbor—the actress Angela Lansbury. Dorothy hires Ruth, a caregiver, to help her around the house. The woman comes on the recommendation of Dorothy’s sister-in-law, Esther Fiske, but neither of them know too much about the 60-something Ruth, who isn’t actually licensed as a caregiver. Ruth was raised in foster care, knows how to manipulate people, and often thinks things like, “Humans are just meat.” She happens to already know all the details of Dorothy’s history. The two women quickly become enmeshed in each other’s lives, each attempting to discover the other’s secrets while keeping their own. But how long will it take until an unhealthy obsession becomes a truly dangerous one? The author excels at acclimating the reader to the logic of her characters, which is effectively deployed for moments of both repulsion and humor. Here Dorothy and Ruth run into Angela Lansbury in the grocery store: “Angela’s cart contained a neat pile of fresh vegetables. Crusty bread peeked out like an advertisement for healthy eating. Dorothy moved around to the front of her own cart, trying to hide the two family-size boxes of corn dogs. Dorothy pushed the cart toward Ruth. ‘My assistant takes care of my cart.’ ” Hanson deftly conveys how celebrity fandom becomes its own sort of grotesquerie for all involved; the twists are many and fun, but there’s a real darkness here that sticks with the reader after the book is finished.
A wonderfully claustrophobic tale of obsession and self-delusion.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9798988287407
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Slippery Fish Press
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.
An epic battle between good and evil with a mystic twist.
When she was 10, Vida visited a fortuneteller who presented her with two broadly different futures and prophesied that she’d be “a champion of the natural world and all its beauty.” Now Vida, raised by her late great-uncle Ogden in a remote cabin surround by the beauties of nature, has no fear of wild animals, including the wolves led by her friend Lupo. Taught by Ogden, Vida, who has a special talent for dredging up gemstones, makes a living by means of a placer mine in a nearby river on government land. Her lover, school principal and activist José Nochelobo, dies in what seems to be an accident but turns out to have been murder. Terrence Boschvark, a wealthy psychopath who’ll stop at nothing to develop some nearby land, is behind the evil doings near her home. Vida, certain that someone is watching her, patiently waits for him to show himself. When he does, he turns out to be deputy sheriff Nash Deacon, who accuses her of killing his cousin Belden Bead and demands that she surrender to him body and soul. Deacon plays a game of sexual terrorism with Vida, who watched his drug-dealing cousin die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and buried him and his car with her uncle’s backhoe. Now she plans for Deacon to be next. Once she kills and buries Deacon and his car, Vida becomes the subject of a manhunt by Boschvark’s remorseless killers. The mystical forces within her lead her to a place of hope. With some help from two native people and a tracker hired to find her, she fights for her life.
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781662500510
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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