Quiet but earnest tales with emotionally resonant characters.
The stories in this collection revolve around the love that characters crave, lost, or may never savor.
In the titular tale, Leonard Leopold is a successful divorce lawyer. But as his 40th birthday approaches, he looks for a new direction in life, which may entail his obvious attraction to his secretary, Jennifer Hopkins. The L-word drives the stories in this book, and not always the romantic kind. For example, in “Carved Stone,” Jane Simonton has had trouble maintaining relationships since her father abandoned the family. But she ultimately develops a love for Inuit carvings that she gradually collects. The highlighted emotion is even a threat in the indelible, SF-flavored “Love Contraception.” It takes place on the planet Coddle after humanity’s extinction. But humans’ Thoughts have already become separate entities, “infecting” other planets. Love, entangled in those Thoughts, somehow proves dangerous to the cloudlets living on Coddle. Many characters share similarities, especially an appreciation of art, including Syd of “Immobilon” who, like Jane, collects Inuit sculptures. But others are delightfully surprising. In the case of “The Doctor Party,” Mr. Jones and his wife, Helen, throw a party with (mostly) physicians. But while he ogles his therapist, Dr. Kretchmer, Helen seems to have her eyes on someone, too. In the same unpredictable vein, Benjamin, in the final tale, “The Miracle of Estelle,” dreads visiting “annoying,” paralytic Estelle with his wife, Melinda. But he soon sees Estelle in another, brighter light. Piatigorsky’s (The Speed of Dark, 2018, etc.) persistent metaphors are sometimes too on-the-surface, particularly as story titles, like Leonard’s open office door representing his newfound openness. Regardless, the author’s breezy style offers frequent moments of insight: “But she loved that he needed her to be happy, and she saw his incessant self-doubts as endearing qualities.” Prefacing each engrossing tale are debut illustrator Carrillo’s black-and-white sketches, which resemble photographs from an album (complete with corners). A standout is “The Doctor Party”—an imperfectly framed snapshot of people awkwardly huddled with drinks.
Quiet but earnest tales with emotionally resonant characters.Pub Date: March 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950437-04-7
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.
Latest installment of the long-running (since 1915, in fact) story anthology.
Helmed by a different editor each year (in 2018, it was Roxane Gay, and in 2017, Meg Wolitzer), the series now falls to fiction/memoir writer Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See, 2014, etc.) along with series editor Pitlor. A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s full of surprises for something in such a convention-governed genre: The apocalypse in question is rather vaguely environmental, and it makes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go seem light and cheerful by contrast: “Jimmy was a shoelooker who cooked his head in a food zapper,” writes Adjei-Brenyah, each word carrying meaning in the mind of the 15-year-old narrator, who’s pretty clearly doomed. In Kathleen Alcott’s “Natural Light,” which follows, a young woman discovers a photograph of her mother in a “museum crowded with tourists.” Just what her mother is doing is something for the reader to wonder at, even as Alcott calmly goes on to reveal the fact that the mother is five years dead and the narrator lonely in the wake of a collapsed marriage, suggesting along the way that no one can ever really know another’s struggles; as the narrator’s father says of a secret enshrined in the image, “She never told you about that time in her life, and I believed that was her choice and her right.” In Nicole Krauss’ “Seeing Ershadi,” an Iranian movie actor means very different things to different dreamers, while Maria Reva’s lyrical “Letter of Apology” is a flawless distillation of life under totalitarianism that packs all the punch of a Kundera novel in the space of just a dozen-odd pages. If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension, a theme ably worked by Weike Wang in her standout closing story, “Omakase,” centering on “one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.”
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-48424-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Connelly takes a break from his Harry Bosch police novels (The Last Coyote, p. 328, etc.) for something even more intense: a reporter's single-minded pursuit of the serial killer who murdered his twin. Even his buddies in the Denver PD thought Sean McEvoy's shooting in the backseat of his car looked like a classic cop suicide, right clown to the motive: his despondency over his failure to clear the murder of a University of Denver student. But as Sean's twin brother, Jack, of the Rocky Mountain News, notices tiny clues that marked Sean's death as murder, his suspicions about the dying message Sean scrawled inside his fogged windshield—"Out of space. Out of time"—alert him to a series of eerily similar killings stretching from Sarasota to Albuquerque. The pattern, Jack realizes, involves two sets of murders: a series of sex killings of children, and then the executions (duly camouflaged as suicides) of the investigating police officers. Armed with what he's dug up, Jack heads off to Washington, to the Law Enforcement Foundation and the FBI. The real fireworks begin as Jack trades his official silence for an inside role in the investigation, only to find himself shut out of both the case and the story. From then on in, Jack, falling hard for Rachel Walling, the FBI agent in charge of the case, rides his Bureau connections like a bucking bronco—even as one William Gladden, a pedophile picked up on a low-level charge in Santa Monica, schemes to make bail before the police can run his prints through the national computer, then waits with sick patience for his chance at his next victim. The long-awaited confrontation between Jack and Gladden comes at an LA video store; but even afterward, Jack's left with devastating questions about the case. Connelly wrings suspense out of every possible aspect of Jack's obsessive hunt for his brother's killer. Prepare to be played like a violin.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-15398-2
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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