by J. Robert Lennon ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2021
Sharp, inventive—and disorienting in all the good ways.
An askew, uncanny—and consistently compelling—novel about memory, dislocation, and trauma.
A nameless woman—one without any past she seems able or inclined to access—checks into a guesthouse owned by two women, both ex-judges named Clara, and is assigned both a room named Mercy and, it seems, the task of completing an extremely challenging (and possibly shape-shifting) jigsaw puzzle in the common room. In the morning her hosts send her out, armed with a map and vague instructions, to look for a job and a place to live in their small, bewildering Subdivision, which is for now cut off from the nearby city. Our baffled but cheerful heroine takes all this in stride, mostly. She meets the (very few, frequently reappearing) denizens of this place. She makes an ally and protector in Cylvia, a hand-held digital assistant who requires light to stay charged; is threatened by the bakemono, a spirit who, in protean male guises, keeps trying to seduce or mislead her; keeps encountering and reencountering a small boy (who others seem to think accompanied her here) and a troubled delivery-truck driver who's also staying at the guesthouse. Eventually she secures work in an office tower abandoned after a wind-borne calamity in the vague but recent past, and there she gets sucked into a quantum-physics experiment involving tennis balls and a wall—an experiment being conducted by the tower's only other occupant. The tone is surreal and the result sometimes, à la Kafka, darkly funny. The novel features elements of the picaresque (she is Alice, or perhaps Gulliver), but it also has the everyday-suburban-made-strange-and-luminous quality of Steven Millhauser and the gleefully absurd, improvised feel of César Aira. Eventually the narrator's other, prior world starts to bleed through, and the reader gains tools that help to illuminate the mystery, if not quite (and bless Lennon for this) solve it.
Sharp, inventive—and disorienting in all the good ways.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64445-048-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
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New York Times Bestseller
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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