Tait’s debut novel is weighed down by stereotypical characters and situations.
A college friendship between two Dartmouth women is tested by post-graduation life in New York City.
M. (our narrator goes by a single initial) and her best friend, Belle Bailey, could not be more different. M. is an ultraserious finance major and varsity squash player who has little interest in or luck with the opposite sex. Belle is a character from a musical, “blond head and hundred-watt smile and apple-red accessories,” given to penning invitations on her monogrammed letterpress cards that say things like “Ice-skating on Occom Pond after class today—bundle up in College colors and I’ll bring the hot cocoa (spiked, of course—shhhhh!).” When both of Belle’s parents are killed in a plane crash, she becomes even more of a romantic figure. After graduation, M. lands a job at Bartholomew Brothers, “the most iconic of the New York investment banks”—as does Chase Breckenridge, the repugnant frat boy Belle's been dating all through college, though why she would be interested in this pig of a fellow remains anyone’s guess. While Belle rides around Manhattan on her red bicycle, taking photos for her airy-fairy lifestyle blog, La Belle Vie, M. toils away at the viciously sexist, competitive, and abusive firm, dealing with the horrific Chase and even less savory characters. The one exception is a whimsical former hot air balloonist named Jeremy, who could not be more out of place in finance but seems made for Belle. Unfortunately, none of these characters ever feels real, and the results of their poor choices are muffled—even the market crash seems to happen offstage. When M. turns down both the job at a socially conscious firm and the ideal man that drop on her doorstep, both are waiting for her when she comes to her senses. Along similar lines, it wasn’t a great decision to start the novel with M.'s wedding, undercutting possible suspense. “It didn’t add up to what I was told it would add up to,” says one character, referring to his career. “That may be the great tagline of our generation, you know,” says M. Unfortunately, it's also the tagline of this book.
Tait’s debut novel is weighed down by stereotypical characters and situations.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-09389-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman’s latest will resonate a long time.
In Beartown, where the people are as "tough as the forest, as hard as the ice," the star player on the beloved hockey team is accused of rape, and the town turns upon itself.
Swedish novelist Backman’s (A Man Called Ove, 2014, etc.) story quickly becomes a rich exploration of the culture of hockey, a sport whose acolytes see it as a violent liturgy on ice. Beartown explodes after rape charges are brought against the talented Kevin, son of privilege and influence, who's nearly untouchable because of his transcendent talent. The victim is Maya, the teenage daughter of the hockey club’s much-admired general manager, Peter, another Beartown golden boy, a hockey star who made it to the NHL. Peter was lured home to bring winning hockey back to Beartown. Now, after years of despair, the local club is on the cusp of a championship, but not without Kevin. Backman is a masterful writer, his characters familiar yet distinct, flawed yet heroic. Despite his love for hockey, where fights are part of the game, Peter hates violence. Kira, his wife, is an attorney with an aggressive, take-no-prisoners demeanor. Minor characters include Sune, "the man who has been coach of Beartown's A-team since Peter was a boy," whom the sponsors now want fired. There are scenes that bring tears, scenes of gut-wrenching despair, and moments of sly humor: the club president’s table manners are so crude "you can’t help wondering if he’s actually misunderstood the whole concept of eating." Like Friday Night Lights, this is about more than youth sports; it's part coming-of-age novel, part study of moral failure, and finally a chronicle of groupthink in which an unlikely hero steps forward to save more than one person from self-destruction.
A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman’s latest will resonate a long time.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6076-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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