by Genevieve Scott ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 25, 2023
A compelling character study that tackles intriguing moral questions.
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Scott’s novel combines a mystery plot with an exploration of college culture in the 1990s.
After feeling invisible during her high school career, Rosalind “Ros” Fisher is desperate to be a part of the “cool” crowd at Regis University, near Toronto, in 1998. To that end, she ditches her authentic self, invents a new persona, and excludes her “uncool” roommate, Megan Main, who has horse-print bedsheets and out-of-date clothes, from her life. Shortly after Ros returns to campus from winter break, a dangerous ice storm hits, forcing the college to lock down. A reckless night out ends with Megan missing and Ros the target of her peers’ blame. As lies pile up, Ros finds it increasingly difficult to maintain her credibility. The aftermath of this incident uproots her life, disconnecting her from everyone she knows at Regis. Over the course of Scott’s novel, Ros makes morally questionable decisions, but what she lacks in likability is made up for by Scott’s realistic representation of an insecure young person, via Ros’ narration. Small specificities, such as dormitory names, clothing choices, and ’90s references (“Why would anyone want to be one of the many? Another ponytailed, poli-sci major with an unironic passion for Jewel”) do an excellent job of creating a vivid, believable setting. Indeed, this aspect of the novel, along with the conversational tone, will make readers feel closer to Ros as she reflects on her past. In the book’s second half, the story seamlessly transitions to 20 years in the future, as a news story forces Ros to reexamine someone else’s past behavior as well as confront her own previous actions. Overall, it’s a thought-provoking examination of truth, trauma, and memory, briskly and attentively presenting readers with a vivid portrait of one woman’s complicated experiences.
A compelling character study that tackles intriguing moral questions.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 978-1039004924
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Random House Canada
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
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New York Times Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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SEEN & HEARD
by Nathan Hill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 2023
A warmhearted satire that chronicles our “perfectly, stupidly, dreadfully elegant” accommodations to life.
A bittersweet novel of love gained, lost, and regained over the course of decades.
“They stare across the alley, into dark apartments, and they don’t know it, but they’re staring at each other.” It’s not an outtake from Hitchcock’s Rear Window but instead the wistful longings of two lonely people. Jack Baker, newly arrived in Chicago from Kansas in the 1990s, is a talented photographer who bristles when practical-minded people ask him what his work is about—to say nothing of why he works with Polaroids, which, a hipster friend reminds him, “are mass-produced, instant, cheap, impermanent.” Yes, and that’s the point, for though Jack comes from the windblown prairie, he’s pretty avant-garde. Elizabeth Augustine is a quadruple major at DePaul, “five majors if you count theater, which I have no talent for but enjoy nonetheless,” and exactly the woman Jack hoped he would meet. Life proceeds: That arty hipster becomes a real estate mogul who plants them in a development very much outside their price range until Elizabeth pulls down the big bucks from the psychological research firm that gives Hill’s latest its simple title. “Basically they were a watchdog group, a subcontractor for the FDA and FTC, sniffing out bullshit,” Hill writes, but Elizabeth, scraping by while Jack pulls down pennies as an adjunct professor, discovers that there’s hay to be made creating bullshit rather than exposing it—making airplane seats narrower, for instance, and then selling once normal-sized seats at a premium. Hill romps through our soufflélike culture with a nice sendup of academic literature and broad jabs at memes ranging from organic food (“one-hundred-percent bioavailable”) to progressive parenting, open marriage, and cult behavior (“Elizabeth knew...that the thing that most effectively strengthened and deepened delusions was being surrounded by people who shared the same delusions”) while delivering a story that suggests that while love may not conquer all, it makes a good start.
A warmhearted satire that chronicles our “perfectly, stupidly, dreadfully elegant” accommodations to life.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9780593536117
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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