Who cares what genre this is; as portraits of tough mother-daughter relationships go, it’s as moving as they come.
A great novelist distills the truth of her mother’s life, and her own.
Jen’s 10th book, she writes in an author’s note, began as a memoir of her mother, who died in her mid-90s during Covid-19. But because Agnes Jen resisted sharing her stories and left few artifacts, some invention was necessary. All the same, Jen has “stayed as true as [she] could to the facts” of her mother’s life as well as their troubled relationship: Both were bad girls. A confirmation from beyond the grave: “I knew what this book was going to say even before you wrote it, my mother says now. I knew it was going to say I was a terrible mother, blah blah blah blah. The first part explains how I became so terrible. The second part says how terrible I was.” Well, we won’t argue. Her terribleness consisted in both physical abuse and in brutally intense favoritism, making the second-born author a distant fifth to her four siblings. The withholding, abusive Chinese mother who believes she is simply doing things the Chinese way is not an unfamiliar character in either memoir or fiction, but Jen has created a fully three-dimensional portrait of her. Known for humor, Jen worries her readers will be upset this book isn’t funny, but her eye and her style of description (a couple at her first publishing job “smoked as if it was in their marital vows to keep the tobacco industry alive”; her mother’s puffy eyes are “part goldfish, part James Baldwin,” though she is “too sad to quip”) as well as the back and forth between the postmortem conversations and the main storyline keeps the mood lively. “No, I cannot forget you. You are right. You’ve won,” she concedes to her mother at one point. But actually, and for the same reason, she wins too.
Who cares what genre this is; as portraits of tough mother-daughter relationships go, it’s as moving as they come.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803738
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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