A manic and often funny investigation of fandom.
In Rosenholtz’s epistolary novel, a desperate man reveals his psychological unraveling across a series of fan letters to Taylor Swift.
An unnamed 53-year-old high school English teacher and self-avowed music snob is shocked when he discovers how deeply he enjoys the Taylor Swift album Red (Taylor’s Version), which he listens to accidentally one day on his commute to work—his 13-year-old daughter, Allie, loves TS, of course, but the man is shocked that the music of the pop star speaks to him on such an elemental level. Soon he is listening to nothing else, declaring his car a “TS-only zone” in which his daughters’ other musical requests are not allowed. He embarks on what he calls the “Year of TS,” listening to Swift’s albums in chronological order and assimilating them into his being. “And then there’s Folklore—to be honest, I don’t even say the album’s title aloud, just as I never let my students say ‘Macbeth’ when we’re reading Shakespeare’s Scottish play,” gushes the man, who, because the novel is formatted as fan letters, always addresses Swift in the second person. “I feel unworthy of passing the word through my lips. The most perfect of your perfect albums.” By the time Midnights arrives in the fall of 2022, the man is so obsessed that he stays up until 3 a.m. to download the bonus content despite having to teach the next day. As he recounts his love for Swift’s music, the deleterious effects of his obsession on his life—from his work to his ability to drive to his relationship with his daughters—are increasingly apparent. The letters become more unhinged as time goes on, revealing the desperate fears and irrational dreams of a man on the edge of oblivion.
The author’s narrative voice is deviously comic, with glimmers of mania shining through the generally polite and friendly prose: “Sometimes, your music has even resulted in me losing my temper just a little, typically when anything or anyone comes between me and my enjoyment of you. I tend, for example, to yell quite vigorously at the woman with the disembodied voice who lives deep inside my car’s sound system whenever she interrupts the soothing sounds of your voice.” As the narrator discusses the fact that he and Swift share a birthday or speculates as to whether or not she has read Kurt Vonnegut, the sad realities of the narrator’s life are slowly revealed, such as how his wife kicked him out of the house and how his daughters are embarrassed that he cries whenever certain TS songs come on. Rosenholtz skillfully deploys the phenomenon of fandom—and Taylor Swift fandom in particular—to paint a detailed portrait of a lost soul for whom obsession serves as a kind of life jacket. The premise is a fun one, but it is slightly one-note; though the novel extends to only 220-odd pages, the idea loses some of its steam before the end. Perhaps because the narrator is ultimately so difficult to relate to, the book ends up feeling more like a lengthy black-humor piece than a work of psychological fiction.
A manic and often funny investigation of fandom.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798988180920
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Demersal Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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