Varied, engaging, and skillfully written tales.
A brief collection of five short stories explores universal themes from a variety of perspectives.
Williams’ debut book opens with the title tale, in which a man deals with life at home with his geriatric dog in the early days of the pandemic. In “Uncle Duck,” a fraught relationship between uncle and nephew becomes more complicated with a bathroom renovation. “Ludmilla This, Ludmilla That” tells of a New Yorker’s sequentially unsuccessful attempts at romance. “Bunny” jumps back to the early days of the Great Depression as a woman tries to ensure that her sister’s death is treated respectfully, at least by the local newspaper. The final work, “The Guru Had an Off Night,” returns to the present as a father and son suffer through a tedious sales pitch with appropriate skepticism. The five stories are varied in topic and style, and they demonstrate an appreciable versatility; for example, Williams experiments with a choppy, commandlike prose in the opening tale: “Stop & Shop. Short line out front. Social distance. Grim faces. Mask up, eyes down.” Other stories offer more traditional narratives and delve into familiar themes, such as masculinity, family, and connection, from different angles (“I was more comfortable as the father of a little boy than of a teenager, even less so now of a young man,” the narrator of “The Guru Had an Off Night” muses), offering thought-provoking and challenging interpretations of human beings’ responsibilities toward one another. Manhattanites and those from other parts of New York state will particularly appreciate the precision of most stories’ carefully developed settings, which are full of subtle, realistic details. Some characters are less engaging than others—in particular, the protagonist of “Ludmilla” grows tedious with his expectations of reciprocated affections—but most are compelling and multilayered, offering readers plenty to ponder.
Varied, engaging, and skillfully written tales.Pub Date: March 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781667880914
Page Count: 90
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart.
A philosophical discourse inside an addiction narrative, all wrapped up in a quest novel.
Poet Akbar's debut in fiction features Cyrus Shams, a child of the Midwest and of the Middle East. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother, Roya, a passenger on a domestic flight in Iran, was killed by a mistakenly fired U.S. missile. His father, Ali, who after Roya died moved with Cyrus to small-town Indiana and worked at a poultry factory farm, has also died. Cyrus disappeared for a time into alcoholism and drugs. Now on the cusp of 30, newly sober but still feeling stuck in his college town, Cyrus becomes obsessed with making his life matter, and he conceives of a grand poetic project, The Book of Martyrs (at the completion of which, it seems, he may commit suicide). By chance, he discovers online a terminally ill Iranian American artist, Orkideh, who has decided to live out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum, having candid tête-à-têtes with the visitors who line up to see her, and Cyrus—accompanied by Zee, his friend and lover, who's understandably a bit alarmed by all this—embarks on a quest to visit and consult with and learn from her. The novel is talky, ambitious, allusive, deeply meditative, and especially good in its exploration of Cyrus as not being between ethnic or national identities but inescapably, radically both Persian and American. It succeeds so well on its own terms that the novel's occasional flaws—big coincidences, forays into other narrators that sometimes fall flat, dream-narratives, occasional small grandiosities—don't mar the experience in any significant way.
Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593537619
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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