Exciting in form; powerful in content.
A queer Black college student alchemizes her rage into a mixed-media document exposing how her university has failed its Black community in this inventive debut novel.
In 2013, Sahara Kesandu Nwadike—her father is Nigerian and her mother African American—is a sophomore studying English in Chicago. Classes barely engage her (she dubs her intro to writing course “High School Revisited”); she feels she’s mostly there to form part of a “diversity showcase” and resents rich kids like her absentee roommate. The campus culture is one of pervasive microaggressions, with buildings named after eugenicists and the Black Student Coalition headed by white Ph.D. student “Lone Caucasian.” The book’s title refers to Black students who have dropped out, transferred, or died—including by suicide. Sahara looks set to join their ranks: She’s been drinking and cutting for years, and her substance abuse accelerates as she tries to impress a clubbing buddy. She personifies her depression as “Life Partner,” who perpetuates self-destructive behaviors such as disordered eating. Trying to rescue her from the brink are her Korean American best friend, “Ride or Die,” and her “constant crush,” Mariah. Chukwu is matter-of-fact about Sahara’s bisexual attractions and explores mental health and suicidal ideation with a sardonic but never flippant tone. The book's imaginative structure provides a lift: It takes the form of Sahara's honors thesis, inspired by her late Aunt Nita’s zine, organized into “Tracks” and filled with paper collages, chat threads, playlists, emails, and imagined dialogues. Sahara addresses the thesis committee directly, and her one-liners zing. The nicknames and party scenes grow somewhat wearisome; the plot doesn’t soar until a tragedy brought on by the university hospital’s negligence. Still, in energy this is reminiscent of Luster and Queenie.
Exciting in form; powerful in content.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780358650263
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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