A funny and dark sensibility can’t quite overcome the flaws of this novel, which ends with plenty of unfinished business,...
A coming-of-age debut novel from London-based author Hudson.
This (apparently semiautobiographical) novel traces the first 16 years of the life of a Scottish girl, born into picaresque poverty to a single mother, who is trying to find a man (any man) who can help them elevate their circumstances and secure some stability. The problems (in the novel and with it) begin with the protagonist’s birth, because she is apparently the narrator as soon as she leaves the womb. And both her perceptive abilities and language (often foulmouthed) vary widely, as the reader must determine how much faith to put in a narrator who can neither walk nor talk and who may (or may not) realize how dire (or not) her circumstances might be. Yet, it’s a testament to the author’s compelling voice that the reader feels he or she knows and cares about narrator Janie, her mother, Iris, and many of the ne’er-do-wells they encounter on life’s crooked path. Beyond the frequent profanity, the language abounds with working-class colloquialism: “Grandma had cooked mince, tatties and skirlie.” Janie never knows her father, supposedly an American, but his would-be substitutes range from “a known psychopath” involved in the drug trade to a deadbeat who can’t find or keep work. After the birth of a second daughter, Iris suffers from depression and drugs, leaving preschool Janie to holler, “I’m warning yeh, I’m the grown-up here. I’m the ma!” Aside from a family that is loving in its way, Janie ultimately values “those librarians [who] were the only ones who knew how much hope was snagged in those books.’’ (Sounds like a budding author.) And the greatest fear, for the reader at least, is that her fate will simply recycle her mother’s, that, as Iris says, “Aye, we’re peas in a pod alright Janie.”
A funny and dark sensibility can’t quite overcome the flaws of this novel, which ends with plenty of unfinished business, suggesting a sequel or a series.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-312464-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for...
A viciously funny bloodbath eviscerating the rarefied world of elite creative writing programs, Awad’s latest may be the first (and only?) entry into the canon of MFA horror.
Samantha Heather Mackey is the single outsider among her fiction cohort at Warren University, which is populated by Bunnies. “We call them Bunnies,” she explains, “because that is what they call each other.” The Bunnies are uniform in their Bunniness: rich and hyperfeminine and aggressively childlike, fawning over each other (“Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?”), wearing kitten-printed dresses, frequenting a cafe where all the food is miniature, from the mini cupcakes to the mini sweet potato fries. Samantha is, by definition, not a Bunny. But then a note appears in her student mailbox, sinister and saccharine at once: an invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon, one of their many Bunny customs from which Samantha has always been excluded, like “Touching Tuesdays” or “making little woodland creatures out of marzipan.” And even though she despises the Bunnies and their cooing and their cloying girlishness and incomprehensible stories, she cannot resist the possibility of finally, maybe being invited into their sweet and terrifying club. Smut Salon, though, is tame compared to what the Bunnies call their “Workshop,” which, they explain, is an “experimental” and “intertextual” project that “subverts the whole concept of genre,” and also “the patriarchy of language,” and also several other combinations of creative writing buzzwords. (“This is about the Body,” a Bunny tells Samantha, upon deeming her ready to participate. “The Body performing in all its nuanced viscerality.”) As Samantha falls deeper into their twee and terrifying world—drifting from her only non-Bunny friend in the process—Awad (13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, 2016) gleefully pumps up the novel’s nightmarish quality until the boundary between perception and reality has all but dissolved completely. It’s clear that Awad is having fun here—the proof is in the gore—and her delight is contagious.
Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for everyone.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55973-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
PROFILES
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.
Powers’ (Orfeo, 2014, etc.) 12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life.
In this work, Powers takes on the subject of nature, or our relationship to nature, as filtered through the lens of environmental activism, although at its heart the book is after more existential concerns. As is the case with much of Powers’ fiction, it takes shape slowly—first in a pastiche of narratives establishing the characters (a psychologist, an undergraduate who died briefly but was revived, a paraplegic computer game designer, a homeless vet), and then in the kaleidoscopic ways these individuals come together and break apart. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” Powers writes, quoting the naturalist John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” The idea is important because what Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Nick, for instance, continues a project begun by his grandfather to take repeated photographs of a single chestnut tree, “one a month for seventy-six years.” Pat, a visionary botanist, discovers how trees communicate with one another only to be discredited and then, a generation later, reaffirmed. What links the characters is survival—the survival of both trees and human beings. The bulk of the action unfolds during the timber wars of the late 1990s, as the characters coalesce on the Pacific coast to save old-growth sequoia from logging concerns. For Powers, however, political or environmental activism becomes a filter through which to consider the connectedness of all things—not only the human lives he portrays in often painfully intricate dimensions, but also the biosphere, both virtual and natural. “The world starts here,” Powers insists. “This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.”
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63552-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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