An elegantly written novel for lovers of poetry and literary history.
Nonfiction author Kravetz’s debut novel is a compelling literary mystery that explores the creation of poet Sylvia Plath’s only novel.
Organized into nine “stanzas,” or sections, the narrative is told over three different timelines by three different women, all connected in some way to Plath. In 2019, Estee, a 65-year-old master curator for a small Boston auction house, must determine whether a set of notebooks found in the attic of a South Boston Victorian is the original manuscript of Plath’s semiautobiographical The Bell Jar, published under a pseudonym a few months before her suicide in 1963. As she vets the documents with the assistance of Plath expert Nicolas Jacob, Estee discovers an unexpected personal connection to the poet. Covering the years 1958 to 1963 in a letter addressed to her old poetry professor Robert Lowell, Boston Rhodes, a pen name for the ambitious Agatha White (a thinly veiled Anne Sexton), recounts the seething jealousy that drives her to undermine her literary rival. “Sylvia was a success in all the ways I was not,” she notes acidly. In 1953, Ruth Barnhouse, the only female psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, uses unconventional therapies to treat her patients, one of whom is a Miss Plath recovering from a failed suicide attempt. Kravetz skillfully weaves the three storylines into a satisfying whole as the mystery of Plath’s journals is resolved. Writing about real literary figures can be tricky, especially if their descendants are still living, but the author brings his characters, both imagined and historical, to life with sensitivity. Of his protagonists, Rhodes is the standout, an unreliable narrator nonpareil whose inner “venom voice…cuts to the marrow of truth.”
An elegantly written novel for lovers of poetry and literary history.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-313999-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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