An exquisite tracing of the tangled lines of mother-daughter love, loss, and grief.
Sixteen-year-old Maddy Wakefield is dying of cancer, and in her last months, she has decided to find her biological father.
Maddy’s mother, Eve, raised Maddy on her own with the support of her parents and, eventually, Robin, a loving partner and father figure for Maddy. She always told Maddy that her father, Antonio, didn't want children. (At least he didn't want them with Eve.) Yet as Maddy endures the ever harder struggle with leukemia, she decides it’s time to contact him, and they quickly begin an email correspondence that Maddy decides to keep secret from Eve. While Maddy connects with her father, she also discovers first love with a boy named Jack Bell as they collaborate on a video project to raise awareness about climate change. The project inspires Maddy to turn her talents on herself, recording in her sketches the lines of her own mourning process, through increasingly emotionally raw self-portraits. After Maddy’s death, Eve discovers her correspondence with Antonio, but it is Maddy’s personal final edit of the animation project that triggers Eve’s quest to find Antonio herself. In this, her debut novel, Raney intimately portrays the complex relationship between Maddy and Eve, illuminating their secret struggles with cancer and each other. With chapters alternating between Maddy's and Eve’s perspectives, it reads, at times, like two rather different books stitched together: Maddy’s chapters put us squarely in her world—full of teenage angst, emotions not yet dulled by experience, and a focused drive for answers. In contrast, Eve’s chapters trace a more mature, grief-stricken journey. And as Eve seeks answers from Antonio (or perhaps she seeks a face that will mirror Maddy’s one last time), she may recklessly risk the life she has built with Robin.
An exquisite tracing of the tangled lines of mother-daughter love, loss, and grief.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0869-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
A frank look at the complexities of family, race and culture.
A Chinese family spanning the U.S. and the Netherlands grapples with the disappearance of one of their own.
Twenty-six-year-old Amy Lee is living in her parents’ cramped Queens apartment when she gets a frantic call from Lukas Tan, the Dutch second cousin she’s never met. Her successful older sister, Sylvie, who had flown to the Netherlands to see their ailing grandmother, is missing. Amy’s questions only mount as she looks into Sylvie’s disappearance. Why does Sylvie’s husband, Jim, look so bedraggled when Amy tracks him down, and why are all his belongings missing from the Brooklyn Heights apartment he and Sylvie share? Why is Sylvie no longer employed by her high-powered consulting firm? And when Amy finally musters up the courage to travel to the Netherlands for the first time, why do her relatives—the Tan family, including Lukas and his parents, Helena and Willem—act so strangely whenever Sylvie is brought up? Amy’s search is interlaced with chapters from Sylvie’s point of view from a month earlier as she returns to the Netherlands, where she had been sent as a baby by parents who couldn't afford to keep her, to be raised by the Tans. As Amy navigates fraught police visits and her own rising fears, she gradually uncovers the family’s deepest secrets, some of them decades old. Though the novel is rife with romantic entanglements and revelations that wouldn’t be amiss in a soap opera, its emotional core is the bond between the Lee sisters, one of mutual devotion and a tinge of envy. Their intertwined relationship is mirrored in the novel’s structure—their alternating chapters, separated in time and space, echo each other. Both ride the same bike through the Tans’ village, both encounter the same dashing cellist. Kwok (Mambo in Chinatown, 2014, etc.), who lives in the Netherlands, is eloquent on the clumsy, overt racism Chinese people face there: “Sometimes I think that because we Dutch believe we are so emancipated, we become blind to the faults in ourselves,” one of her characters says. But the book is a meditation not just on racism, but on (not) belonging: “When you were different,” Sylvie thinks, “who knew if it was because of a lack of social graces or the language barrier or your skin color?”
A frank look at the complexities of family, race and culture.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283430-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.
Wayne’s latest foray into the dark minds of lonely young men follows the rise and fall of a friendship between two aspiring fiction writers on opposite sides of a vast cultural divide.
In 1996, our unnamed protagonist is living a cushy New York City life: He's a first-year student in Columbia’s MFA program in fiction (the exorbitant bill footed by his father) who’s illegally subletting his great-aunt’s rent-controlled East Village apartment (for which his father also foots the bill). And it is in this state—acutely aware of his unearned advantages, questioning his literary potential, and deeply alone—that he meets Billy. Billy is an anomaly in the program: a community college grad from small-town Illinois, staggeringly talented, and very broke. But shared unease is as strong a foundation for friendship as any, and soon, our protagonist invites Billy to take over his spare room, a mutually beneficial if precarious arrangement. They are the very clear products of two different Americas, one the paragon of working-class hardscrabble masculinity, the other an exemplar of the emasculating properties of parental wealth—mirror images, each in possession of what the other lacks. “He would always have to struggle to stay financially afloat,” our protagonist realizes, “and I would always be fine, all because my father was a professional and his was a layabout. I had an abundance of resources; here was a concrete means for me to share it.” And he means it, when he thinks it, and for a while, the affection between them is enough to (mostly) paper over the awkward imbalance of the setup. Wayne (Loner, 2016) captures the nuances of this dynamic—a musky cocktail of intimacy and rage and unspoken mutual resentment—with draftsmanlike precision, and when the breaking point comes, as, of course, it does, it leaves one feeling vaguely ill, in the best way possible.
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-400-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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