What can’t McCauley do? A writer to watch.
Short fiction featuring Black and Latine characters trying to figure out their roles within their families, their love lives, and their communities.
In the bite-sized title story of McCauley’s collection, the narrator, Andra, moves to South Florida, where her new co-workers want to know where she’s from. “No, I mean…really?” they say. Andra’s father is Black, her mother Puerto Rican. She’s visibly othered, but grief has also estranged her, as she’s recently lost her mother. When Andra runs into a dark-skinned Latina at a panadería who speaks Spanish to her, she freezes, thinking of her mother, “Body-full with misted ancestors, yearning for old ghosts.” McCauley, who is also Afro-Latina, chronicles such yearnings in each story, interested in those spaces where differing forces collide internally and externally. Sometimes those forces are based in identity, as in the stunning opening story, “Torsion,” in which the narrator, Claudia (another young Afro-Latina) weighs loyalty to her mother against her desire to move into a self-determined future after her mother asks her to help illegally seize her young disabled brother from the foster parent he’s living with. Almost always, those forces have a moral dimension, as well, as in “Good Guys,” in which Alejandro, a college student at Miami Dade College, seeks to convince the audience, and himself, that he’s better than the class villain, Vick, who comes on to a young woman with a very good reason for not being interested in dating. The stories hang together in surprising ways, often linked across time—McCauley excels at historical fiction as well as contemporary. Individually, they are each admiringly gutsy and tender, with flashes of poetry. No reader will be surprised to learn that McCauley’s debut—Scar On / Scar Off (2017)—blended prose and poems.
What can’t McCauley do? A writer to watch.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781640095687
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.
The Red River of the North cuts a vivid track through the hardscrabble lives that anchor Erdrich’s surpassing North Dakota fiction.
This deft, almost winsome novel begins at night, with Crystal Frechette, a trucker. She’s hauling sugar beets and wearing “a lucky hat knitted by her daughter,” Kismet Poe. Her headlights are “peacefully cutting radiant holes in the blackness” when she glimpses a mountain lion vault across the road. It’s a sign, but of what? Kismet, finishing high school, is edgy, furious, and bored. Both Gary Geist, her school’s quarterback, and Hugo Dumach, a nerdy home-schooler, fixate on her as the angel destined to slay their wildly divergent demons. This nutty love triangle kickstarts the plot; Kismet, in a futile stab at avoiding teen marriage, slips from a bridge into the cold Red River, floating downstream until she’s rescued. But true love here is the kind between mother and daughter. This pair, beset by the 2008 economic meltdown, proves expert in “getting trapped but at least not giving up.” Around them, a recent, communal catastrophe on the frozen river stays murky through three-quarters of the story. In counterpoint, the town’s daffy book club dissects Eat Pray Love and The Road, each session blooming into comic set pieces. Erdrich reaches for some of her fictional staples: a waitressing gig, multiple viewpoints, and, always, mixed-heritage Native people trying to grasp and transmit that heritage. Her writing feels both effortless and wise. She notes a boy’s “shy armpits” and how a soundproofed house can feel “inhuman, maybe even violent.” Even if a minor character, the Catholic priest, bogs down in caricature, Erdrich has few equals in braiding landscape and sky into the marrow of her characters. Her poet’s origins are in full force as she folds in the sickening damage of fracking and pesticide-dependent agriculture, right alongside the sprouts of resistance.
In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780063277052
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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