More thoughtful, elegantly written fiction in the classic realist tradition by the gifted Thompson.
A young woman with a reading disability finds an unexpected way into the written word when she crosses paths with a famous poet.
A recent community college dropout, narrator Carla “doesn’t process words on a page very well” and claims to be perfectly happy working for a landscape gardener in Northern California even though her well-meaning, bossy mother and her live-in boyfriend, Aaron, both think she could do better if she would only apply herself. Aaron, an IT guy who likes to camp and go hear music in local bars, is also skeptical when Carla becomes involved in the life of Viridian, a renowned poet she meets while taking care of the elderly woman’s garden. “Why do you want to hang out with these people anyway?” he asks after they attend a party at Viridian’s house with various chattering members of the literati (each one a sharp character study). “I’m not sure we’ve got a lot in common.” But Carla had her world expanded when, on a whim, she attended a poetry reading featuring Viridian. “For the first time [I] really heard a poem,” she says. And later: “It all ended up inside me.” In her usual accomplished and sensitive fashion, Thompson invites us into the consciousness of a young woman tentatively entering a whole new world that may give her a clue to who she is meant to be, while at the same time fearing that the enticing, glamorous creatures who live there simply view her as a useful helpmeet. The plot is propelled by various people trying to persuade Viridian to make public the last poems of her lover Mathias, a poet even more famous than she by virtue of killing himself at 35, but the real story is Carla’s gradual realization of what she wants and what she can be. The brilliantly rendered mise-en-scène of quarrelsome, ego-ridden, yet touchingly fragile poets and the literary entrepreneurs who circle around them makes a vivid backdrop for this classic coming-of-age tale.
More thoughtful, elegantly written fiction in the classic realist tradition by the gifted Thompson.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64375-156-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A delightfully nostalgic novel about how the things we loved in the past have the power to shape our future.
A boy band cruise is the site of one woman’s post-divorce healing.
Annie never meant to end up alone on a Boy Talk cruise, but that’s exactly what happens when her sister breaks a leg and has to bow out of their vacation. Now Annie is sharing a cabin with a stranger, stuck on the cruise ship American Fantasy with the 1990s band—and thousands of their biggest fans, known as Talkers. Annie doesn’t consider herself a Talker, even if she was a fan back in the day. But reeling from a recent divorce and dealing with complex feelings about turning 50, Annie throws herself into the distraction of the trip. What she doesn’t expect is to truly connect with the music, the band, the other fans, and herself. As Annie observes, “This was why people turned to religion or watched the Super Bowl at a sports bar instead of alone in their living room. It felt good to be a part of something where your passion was celebrated instead of mocked.” All the Talkers dream of having a special bond with “the guys,” but when Annie actually does meet Keith, a Boy Talk member who’s clearly going through a hard time, she wonders if their connection is real or if she’s just as delusional as the other (mostly) women on the ship. Straub depicts a wonderfully immersive world aboard the American Fantasy, one where each woman assigns herself a favorite guy and everyone is bedecked in Boy Talk merch. For five days, the Talkers live in a fantasy world where the only thing that matters is their connection with a band that meant everything to them so many years ago. As Annie puts it, “Inside her head, which is where she heard the music, it had touched some lever so deep that it couldn’t be reversed…the music was a direct vein to her own childhood, the least complicated part of her life.”
A delightfully nostalgic novel about how the things we loved in the past have the power to shape our future.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798217046850
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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