A compelling exercise in worldbuilding and genre blending that toggles among the recent past, present, and near future.
Set primarily in California, this short-story collection mixes the mundane and the bizarre with an authority stemming from its concrete sense of place.
This collection of linked stories takes its name from a hypothesis positing that small mammals may grow larger on islands while large mammals may grow smaller. While teaching a geography class at San Diego State University at the outset of the Obama administration, a professor reflects on how the theory manifests in her home country, a nameless island nation run by a dictator known for dressing in skimpy bathing suits. Ostensibly protecting her small daughter from bad influences, a San Francisco mother takes a dislike to a clique of schoolgirls who hang out near her home, inviting more trouble than she can possibly realize. Some of the stories stay firmly or mostly anchored in realism, focusing on characters and conflicts that feel all too plausible: A child of divorce forced to move from Oklahoma to Minnesota disappears; a perpetually single woman is invited camping by an old friend; a survivalist teaches her nephew the ruthless ways of the wild. Other stories, however, veer into supernatural or dystopian territory. A Hollywood agent has a monstrous encounter during a drug trip. A professional image rehabilitator “polish[es]” reputations for a living. Characters sometimes recur, typically in the form of passing references, but certain objects, events, and threats serve as the overarching throughline: a set of teeth extracted from the mouth of a 17th-century Norwegian explorer, mysterious mounds of human bones that fuel rumors of a serial killer on the prowl, the tragic death of a cosmonaut in a spaceflight accident, the constant specter of environmental disaster. Some stories feel tighter and more polished than others, and the collection as a whole could be more cohesive, but the overall effect is appealingly weird, as if the uncanny valley took literary form.
A compelling exercise in worldbuilding and genre blending that toggles among the recent past, present, and near future.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781982122201
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.
A free-spirited woman forges a career as a writer and journalist, risking scandal and war zones to follow her heart.
Allende’s latest opens in San Francisco in 1873, introducing Emilia at age 7, the illegitimate daughter of Molly Walsh, who, as a novice nun, was seduced and abandoned by wealthy Chilean Gonzalo Andrés del Valle. Molly goes on to a successful marriage, Emilia grows up with a loving stepfather, and at 17 she begins writing, then publishing, sensational dime novels under the pseudonym Brandon J. Price. By 23, she’s a journalist with a column in The Daily Examiner, though still forced to hide her gender behind her pen name. Rule breaking is in her nature, and while she accepts, for now, lower pay than men, she decides on a trip to New York to take a lover and learns to control her own contraception. Later, finally writing under her own name, she’s commissioned to go to Chile and cover its civil war from a human angle, accompanied by colleague and friend Eric Whelan, whose focus is the military aspect. Chilean revolutionary politics make for less sprightly reading, but Emilia’s individual encounters with members of high and low society lend atmosphere. These include the president, a great aunt, and eventually her father—now alone, regretful, and mortally ill. Although he disapproves of working women, the two share a “desire to see the world and experience everything intensely,” and when he offers to recognize Emilia as his legitimate child, she accepts. Now the story gathers pace, with Emilia—always and predictably the rebel—witnessing the horrors of battle, discovering that she and Eric are in love, and getting arrested. Not quite plausibly, she instigates a further sequence of impulsive moves before the story is permitted to conclude.
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593975091
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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