Stories that are worth reading twice.
Beauty and youth, desire and privilege are the threads sewing together these seven stories.
Alcott’s protagonists are often beautiful, clever young women from economically impoverished backgrounds who wind up with men many years older and far richer. Estranged from their families of origin and never quite at home with their boyfriends and husbands, these women are ill at ease and even suicidal despite their intelligence and acquired grace, and they must struggle for self-acceptance and independence. In “Natural Light,” the narrator discovers a disturbing photo of her dead mother hanging in a museum, which her father refuses to explain. Separated from her husband, who can’t tolerate her darkness, the woman wonders whether she too might be exempt from answering questions about “who I was or how I suffered.” In “Part of the Country,” the narrator leaves her husband because she believes he likes weak women and only returns to him after she has proved her strength by hurting him. The best stories here are the first and last. In “Emergency,” a group of women who collectively narrate the story excoriates their friend Helen, whose life spirals downward after her rich husband leaves her. “You can’t say whore,” they comment about her “conquests,” “and we would never say whore—well, once we said whore—but you could say without qualms there was trouble.” “Temporary Housing,” which plumbs the deep ties between two self-destructive young women, offers searing commentary on how vulnerable women can be. “Maybe we aren’t girls,” the narrator reflects after learning her childhood friend is dead of an overdose, “surely we were never children, but we might have the talents of animals, sensing everything that wants to kill us, and that we need to kill.” Alcott’s prose is cerebral and knotty, but patience yields exquisite insights about women’s agency and the corrosiveness of male privilege.
Stories that are worth reading twice.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781324051886
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Like your third serving of a delicious meal—still very good, but not much excitement left.
The Steele family’s three-volume St. John adventure comes to a poignant end.
As the author warns in the foreword, if you haven’t read the first two books of this trilogy (Winter in Paradise, 2018; What Happens in Paradise, 2019), don’t start here. If you have, read this one slowly, because at the end we'll be saying goodbye to the series' endearing cast of transplanted Midwesterners, their new friends in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the many wonderful bars, restaurants, estates, bungalows, beaches, and seafaring vessels they frequent. In truth, you may find a leisurely pace easier to maintain than usual. The confounding mysteries and shocking reversals that drove the first two installments are wrapped up here, but the answers are pretty much as expected, and no new excitement is introduced. Threads that could have added a plot boost—a high-powered New York lawyer hired to deal with the devastation Irene Steele suffers as a result of her dead husband’s criminal activity, the FBI investigation into same, an old diary, an unplanned pregnancy—play out gently, or are dropped, instead of picking up the momentum. Hilderbrand’s choice to tell us in the introductory note about her fictionalization of Hurricane Irma takes away any element of surprise that might have had, and she doesn’t use the disaster for much in the way of plot, anyway. Oh, well. There are still plenty of lemongrass sugar cookies and a gorgonzola Caesar with pork belly and wood-grilled sirloin, served with an expensive bottle of cabernet pulled from the cellar of some annoying rich people, reviving the old joke about wine descriptions one last time: “Notes of fire coral, DEET and the Tide Pod challenge.” Just like everything else in 2020, this is not quite what you had hoped for, but, on the other hand, the comfort of a Hilderbrand novel is never something to sneer at.
Like your third serving of a delicious meal—still very good, but not much excitement left.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-31643-558-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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