An empathetic chronicle, both tender and comical.
A young woman searches for a self.
Phoebe Hudson is about to graduate from high school and go off to college when her adoptive mother, Greta, decides she should meet her birth family, the Dahlgrens. Phoebe is reluctant, afraid “for reasons [she] didn’t want to consider, reasons [she] didn’t know how to consider.” Nevertheless, the two set out for Wisconsin, on a trip that proves fateful for both. Looking back at her life many decades later, Phoebe recalls herself as a teenager, wanting “something, anything, to happen.” What does happen on the fraught road to adulthood involves friendship and betrayal, love and self-discovery. Hamilton provides a handful of likely characters to accompany Phoebe on her journey: a best friend—in this case, the privileged Luna Barker; a boy—actually, a horde of them, the assorted, quirky O’Connor brothers; and a wise woman, the acerbic Hertha, a German immigrant, who cleans house for Greta, the Barkers, and the O’Connors, casting a knowing eye on all. As Phoebe feared, the visit to the Dahlgrens unsettles her, leaving her feeling unmoored and betrayed by Greta. She runs away, taking shelter with the O’Connors, who have so many children that she’s sure she won’t be noticed. The brothers do notice her, though, and contrive a farcical event that propels her into a new sense of her identity and her future. At one decisive point, Phoebe remembers lines from Charlotte Brontë that seem to echo her angst: “What was I doing here alone…? What should I do on the morrow? What prospects had I in life? What friends had I on earth? Whence did I come? Whither should I go? What should I do?” They could serve aptly as an epigraph for Hamilton’s perceptive rendering of a young woman’s growing pains.
An empathetic chronicle, both tender and comical.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9798991140287
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Zibby Books
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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