An unusual novel that will challenge readers and keep them alert to how complex PTSD can affect people years into the future.
A woman’s early trauma spirals over decades until middle age, when impending divorce sends her on a cross-country journey to reconnect with her sister and their shared past.
Ruth’s red hair, freckles, and light skin often convince people she’s white, although she identifies as Black. She just doesn’t identify with her personal history. Even her attorney husband, Myron, also Black, and their nonbinary child, Enix, don’t know her true origins in California and their accompanying trauma, involving a sibling’s childhood death and her father’s murder by a police officer neighbor. Chapters from the perspectives of different characters, including Myron, Enix, and Ruth’s childhood friend Clarisse, who’s bipolar, slowly reveal background—not for readerly suspense, but to demonstrate how distanced Ruth is from her past. She and her family live in Louisville, Kentucky, where Enix attends an all-girls private school that they chose but now loathe. The author highlights constant microaggressions the family faces partly through the lens of Myron’s best friend, Anthony, a white fellow lawyer who tries way too hard to seem Black—and whose friendship to both Myron and Ruth matters to the deliberately tangled plot. After Ruth and Myron’s house burns down, she files for divorce and takes Enix on a cross-country car trip so poorly planned and executed that the teen chooses to fly home to her father rather than meet her unknown aunt, Wendy, in Sacramento. Whether it’s Myron’s skepticism about his new girlfriend, Paulina; Clarisse’s boredom with a psych ward’s activities; or the loving welcome Wendy offers Ruth, each character’s attitudes and actions resonate with authentic observation that speaks to the author’s dedication page which lists several dozen names (including that of Breonna Taylor) “and the incalculable number of others who’ve suffered and died under the heel of state-sponsored terrorism since the very inception of the state. And for their families, and their communities, and all of us who struggle to heal.”
An unusual novel that will challenge readers and keep them alert to how complex PTSD can affect people years into the future.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781644453544
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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