A richly detailed, harrowing account of household mayhem and the struggle to forgive.
Castle charts a legacy of neglect and domestic violence in this plangent memoir.
The author begins with a portrait of her tense childhood in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the 1960s, a period dominated by her father, Rudy, a businessman with a hair-trigger temper that led him to physically lash out at her and her mother, Janet. She traces Rudy’s behavior to his own childhood in Chicago during the Great Depression as one of three illegitimate children of a working-class seamstress named Marie and a married doctor who rarely saw his second family, an arrangement that left permanent psychological scars. (“He’s in HELL!” Rudy shouted when the author innocently asked where her grandfather was.) Rudy meted out increasingly severe spankings to Castle over the years; things grew worse when she entered her teens and he harshly restricted her dating activities, fearing that she might wind up like Marie with an out-of-wedlock child. The pressure eventually drove the author to attempt suicide with sleeping pills. Subsequent chapters cover Castle’s reconciliation with Rudy in later years as his health declined and she dug into her grandfather’s identity and his fraught, exploitative relationship with Marie. The author reconstructs her family’s history in an episodic narrative that unfolds in short, intense sections of prose and occasional poetry. It’s a work of deep if sometimes grudging empathy—she imagines scenes from the points of view of Marie, Janet, and Rudy. (Her father befriended hungry kids during his service in the Korean War; there was a benign side to his character that belied the “wolf face” he displayed when infuriated.) Castle depicts her family’s sometimes-brutal pathologies in subtle, evocative prose that vividly plumbs a child’s claustrophobic fear of a father’s rage: “One loud voice like a launched rock. Pleading cries. Thuds, cracks, and then a slap.” The result is a powerful, painful family saga that slowly gives way to hard-won understanding.
A richly detailed, harrowing account of household mayhem and the struggle to forgive.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781942004929
Page Count: 172
Publisher: ELJ Editions
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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