A funny, dark, and deeply human novel about what shapes us as human beings.
A poet attempts to make sense of his dysfunctional history in Hunt’s comic novel.
Cary Scott never stood a chance. He stumbled upon his beloved grandfather’s dead body on his first day of kindergarten. His merciless mother dressed him up as a woman to humiliate him in front of his Cub Scout troop. His closeted father ran off with his closeted uncle. His grandmother forced enemas on him when she decided he was constipated. In high school, he was so terrified of gym class—where he was caught with an erection in the boys’ shower—that he faked stigmata to be excused. Cary’s one moment in the sun came when he wrote a poem about a streaker that got published in the local paper, then adapted into a top-10 hit by country artist Kitty Belle Crawford. He has never followed up on that success, however, and 10 years later he is an obese, single, self-loathing poet with no other published work and a severe eating disorder. Leaping back and forth between childhood traumas and the yo-yo dieting and personal humiliations of his adulthood, Hunt’s novel follows Cary’s unlikely journey toward self-understanding via recovered memory therapy—though whether the memories he ends up recovering are true (and what they might mean for his sense of himself) is not so cut and dried. The writing is as psychologically acute as it is funny, as here when Cary attends an eating disorder conference: “If I were a food, I’d be devil’s food cake,” he explains during an exercise. “I’m sweet and people should like me, but liking me is forbidden. I’m dark and black inside and am quite bad for you if you take me in anything other than small doses. That’s because I’m loaded with fat. Fat and sin.” Hunt is a masterful storyteller, escalating his protagonist’s misadventures to the point of farcical truth. Cary feels just responsible enough for his predicaments to make him a compellingly tragic figure, someone whose larger-than-life problems feel both real and searingly relevant to the reader.
A funny, dark, and deeply human novel about what shapes us as human beings.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781915785435
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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