A beautifully written experimental novel that lacks narrative momentum.
A young woman lays bare her memories in a fragmented debut.
“It begins with our bodies. Skin on Skin. My body burst from yours. Safe together in the violent dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us,” begins Andrews’ debut novel: a meditation on mother-daughter relationships and finding a place to call home. The coming-of-age story is told from the perspective of Lucy, a millennial trying to navigate her present while examining her past. Present-day Lucy lives in her late grandfather’s cottage in Ireland, where she recounts her memories of childhood in northern England. In short vignettes, she remembers the absence of her alcoholic father, the experience of learning to communicate with her deaf brother, and the way her beautiful mother struggled to keep everyone (including herself) together. She also recounts her wild youth, her university experience in London, and the litany of unnamed men who circle her. Lucy’s thoughts constantly return to her mother—the first and great love of her life—and their relationship, which has become strained over the years. As a child, she thought: “I would forever be in her orbit, moving towards her and pulling away while she quietly controlled the tides, anchoring me to something.” The natural untethering that happens between mothers and daughters is remarkably rendered—the heartsickness given gravitas equal to romantic relationships. Andrews is undoubtedly a talented writer, but this book seems more concerned with sentence-level beauty than narrative. The lovely minutiae of the vignettes sometimes overshadow or crowd out the book’s larger themes. Despite this, Andrews’ writing explores themes like memory, home, womanhood, and mother-daughter relationships with shattering clarity: “Girls with orange cheeks in push-up bras brushed past us, smelling of the future” and “that safe, yellow space of bedtimes and steamy kitchens.”
A beautifully written experimental novel that lacks narrative momentum.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-25380-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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