A thoughtful, realistic portrait of uncompromising femininity.
In Thomas’ debut coming-of-age novel, a liberal, headstrong girl lives her life in the conservative South.
Ardor is a young woman determined to live whatever way she pleases. As readers learn through various flashbacks, her childhood home broke when her father ran off with another woman, sending her mother into a series of vacant love affairs that distracted her from her children. The one bright spot in Ardor’s life was her beloved older brother, who served as both corrupter and protector, but even his presence is eventually snatched away. Ardor remains fierce, though, and doesn’t let tragedy stop her from going about her life. She’s well-liked and can make friends with relative ease. She makes lovers with relative ease, too. Ardor has had plenty of flings throughout her young life, causing many in her community to label her a slut, but she takes it all in stride. She never lets the watchful eyes of others stop her from doing what she wants, whether it’s kissing another woman in a committed relationship or sleeping with a married man. With such a long list of vices, it’s little wonder that she’s drawn to nonjudgmental people. Ardor is nonjudgmental herself—unless, of course, someone hurts her or happens to have a value system stricter than hers, in which case, nothing can stop her wrath. She’s not above chewing someone out or lighting a lawn on fire. Readers with a rigid value system may find Ardor’s attitude difficult to swallow at first, but if they can adjust, they’ll be rewarded with a realistic story about the joys and pains of growing up. Along the way, Ardor falls into a typical trap: failing to acknowledge her own judgmental tendencies. Still, it’s a human, realistic fault to have, especially for young people, which highlights the novel’s well-developed coming-of-age motif. Like many young people, Ardor knows everything and lives for the moment. For all the fun she has, however, her life remains quite empty. The vignettes that form the novel’s narrative are somewhat nonchronological, which draws attention to the haphazard, scattered history of lovers who meant nothing. Oddly enough, it’s in the moments she experiences loss that her life seems to hold the most water.
A thoughtful, realistic portrait of uncompromising femininity.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477682920
Page Count: 256
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasant but predictable read.
Heightened emotional tensions caused by Covid-19 add an interesting twist to Juska’s story of friends gathering for a college reunion in 2021.
The framework is familiar: Adults with unsatisfactory lives attend a reunion where they interact with people they once loved, hated, admired, or were mean to; recognizing the dissonance between themselves then and now leads to inner growth. But Covid has forced members of Walthrop’s class of 1995 to return to the Maine liberal arts college one year late for their 25th reunion. Between drinking beer and making jokey banter about youthful antics, the gathered characters evoke Americans’ post-lockdown mood of exhaustion and general unease. Hope, Polly, and Adam, the three friends who take turns narrating, were famously close in college. Although they’ve stayed in touch, their lives have diverged. Hope, once a self-confident student, has become an anxious stay-at-home suburban mom who pretends tense undercurrents in her family life don’t exist. (Her charmingly snarky teenage daughter is the book’s most entertaining character.) Fellow students had considered Polly intimidatingly cool, but as a working-class Brooklyn girl she “often felt like an outlier” at preppy Walthrop; now an adjunct college instructor, she lives back in Brooklyn with her teenage son, Jonah, and has never told Hope, her supposed best friend, the truth about Jonah’s conception or his father’s identity. Dangerously wild in college, environmental lawyer Adam has evolved into a devoted family man in rural New Hampshire, but the deepening depression and agoraphobia his wife has exhibited since Covid are growing burdens. As the weekend progresses, the three friends mostly avoid delving below the surface of things until events bring each to a point of crisis and they begin reconnecting. The problem is that, given their undiscussed, long-standing resentments, the two women’s friendship is never convincing, and maintaining their relationships never seems a high priority to Adam. What works in this novel is how Juska keeps the Covid cloud hovering in readers’ minds without overkill.
A pleasant but predictable read.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780063346765
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.
A tale of poison and obsession set amid the toxic halls of academe.
Expelled from her graduate program in biological science after a lab-mate dies, a victim of the group's toxicological experiments, Nell Barber is left obsessed and unmoored. Though once she’d been focused on oak trees, she is now consumed by the need to finish the dead girl’s project to “neutralize botanical toxins,” to combine the poison and its antidote. Now it is Nell’s mission, working alone in the exile of her Brooklyn apartment, to build “a poison that undoes itself.” Yet it is not the work that is at the heart of her obsession but her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas. The novel itself is a series of journal entries, all addressed to her absent beloved. “As with the old work, the new work is for you, Joan,” Nell writes. “What isn’t for you?” The rest of Nell’s world is populated with Joan-adjacent players. There is Joan’s husband, Barry, the self-important and useless Associate Director of Columbia Undergraduate Residence Halls—less a threat to Nell than a man-shaped afterthought—and Nell's two best friends, Tom and Mishti, who, as students in good standing, still have access to the privilege of Joan’s presence, both enrolled as nondepartmental students in her class. Mishti is a beautiful chemist; Tom is a beautiful medieval and Renaissance historian and also Nell’s ex-boyfriend. Soon, all six of them are intertwined, a web of sex and betrayal, with Joan (always) at the center. It is a lush and brooding novel, over-the-top in its foreboding, with Dinerstein Knight (The Sunlit Night, 2015) walking the delicate line—mostly successfully—between the Grecian and the absurd. As a string of weirdly mannered sentences, it is a joyfully deranged pleasure; as a novel, though, the experience is frustratingly hollow, populated by characters who only come to life in the book’s final third.
Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7737-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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