An ambitious novel about the possibility of redemption within families.
A patriarch’s death causes a reckoning for his troubled children in Lipinski’s debut literary novel.
Dawn Udell is back in her hometown of Tulsa to attend the funeral of her semiestranged father, a prominent local pastor. A struggling LA screenwriter, she happens to be in the middle of writing a television pilot about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre—an event to which her White family has a murky connection. Tension with her father over an interracial crush in high school is what sent her west in the first place. Now, her father’s death reunites her with her two siblings whose lives are no simpler for having remained in town. Her sister, Sheila, is a hospice worker who has become reliant on pills. She’s also been carrying on an affair with the married son of one of her dying patients. Her brother, Andrew, followed their father to the pulpit…and also into infidelity. His marriage is on the rocks since his wife discovered his most recent affair, and he’s unsure how to repair his image in the eyes of the gossips in his congregation. To distract himself, Andrew has been researching his great aunt Kitty Harrison, a 1930s communist and labor activist. The story is told by each of the four in turn, Kitty included, in flashbacks—revealing how each of them is haunted in different ways. “You don’t know what it’s like being stuck here, ghosts all around you,” Sheila says to Dawn at one point. “Of course, I know what it’s like,” she responds. “That’s why I left.” Can this funeral serve to exorcise the ghosts not only of the siblings’ childhood, but of their family’s sins going back to the dark beginnings of Tulsa’s racial history? It’s a tall order, but it may be the only way to survive the weekend.
Lipinski’s prose is smooth and surprising, insightfully probing uncomfortable images and emotions: “It was startling how much his face resembled a finely sculpted wax effigy more than the father she’d seen last about two years ago at Christmas….This was what death looked like. Flesh left behind, like a tree cut down. She took a deep breath, relieved to find the room smelled antiseptic and clean.” The siblings are compellingly messy. Each starts out truly unlikable and slowly wins the reader over (mostly) as the origins of their dysfunctions are revealed. The dysfunction carries over into the larger portrait of Tulsa—a city that Lipinski summons with unexpected vibrancy—and its fraught history. Dawn expresses some ambivalence about whether or not the Tulsa Race Massacre is a story she should be telling, and it’s clear the author has considered such topics as well. To the extent that the book is about racism, it is about White people attempting to grapple with racism within their own families—as well as a host of other unsavory tendencies that seem to spill over from one generation to another. The novel succeeds in dramatizing the attempt, at least, and does so with a cast of flawed and vivid characters.
An ambitious novel about the possibility of redemption within families.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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