A bracingly honest portrait of a woman reckoning with inherited shame while searching for “a third space, a new way of...
Marlowe’s memoir-in-essays examines issues of identity, belonging, and the corrosive effects of racism across three continents.
The author opens with a striking Halloween memory as an 11-year-old in Ecuador in 1978, when she divided her face in half with eyeliner and costumed herself as “una mestiza”—half Indigenous, half Spanish. For her Peruvian mother, “mestiza” was “a dirty word,” the author says, but this bicultural split would define Marlowe’s life. Raised in both her South American mother’s world and her Anglo American father’s, between Manila and Quito and Northern California, Marlowe inhabited what she calls “la frontera”—the borderlands where cultures clash. She traces how notions of racial hierarchy calcify within families, often under the guise of “tradition.” The essays circle around moments of exclusion and recognition: a friend flinching at a baby-tooth charm on her bracelet; someone calling her a “white bitch” during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, despite her “black hair curling down my back, my olive skin, my red lipstick and hoop earrings”; watching her mother cry after being labeled an “outsider” by Marlowe’s paternal grandfather. The collection’s power lies in the author’s ability to transform intimate family moments into sharp cultural critiques. “Death Tax” moves between her father’s physician-assisted suicide and her mother’s final days, with a fragmented structure that mirrors how grief “press[ed] on my shoulders,” but without offering false comfort. “The Window” turns a dinner party into a study of sustained exclusion. Marlowe excels at revealing how microaggressions accumulate within families over decades. The essays falter when self-consciousness overtakes the storytelling, however; in “Based on a True Story,” for instance, meta-commentary about narrative perspective obscures rather than illuminates the author’s incisive observations about performative allyship. When Marlowe’s voice finds its rhythm, however, it cuts clean; she’s unflinching about what she sees as her own complicity in the problems she diagnoses, refusing easy absolution. The collection’s achievement lies in Marlowe’s willingness to dwell in contradictions, and the uncomfortable space of feeling perpetually in between.
A bracingly honest portrait of a woman reckoning with inherited shame while searching for “a third space, a new way of thinking.”Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9798896361008
Page Count: 272
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.
Remembering “Hershy.”
Three hundred and twenty-eight days. That’s how long Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held in captivity—tortured and starved by his captors in underground tunnels—before he was executed. He was 23 years old. In this unvarnished and heartrending account, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, writes of the unending torment that she and her husband, Jon, endured after learning that their son had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the attacks of October 7, 2023. Like so many other young people on that day, Hersh was attending a music festival in Israel—a celebration of love and unity. As Goldberg-Polin writes, her son was “the only American citizen kidnapped alive on October 7th who did not return alive.” In direct, plainspoken language that steers clear of politics, the author, a Jewish educator, recounts “being in a daze of the most indescribably sickening horror and fear, like nothing I had ever felt in my life. I remember my heart racing and feeling like I was in a permanent state of someone scaring me.” In addition to “shovel[ing] out my pain in the form of words,” she shares reminiscences of her son, as well as details that only a parent could notice. “His eyes were cookies,” she says of her “Hershy.” “I couldn’t find the pupils within the dark chocolate-brown irises.…He had a raspy voice, even when he was a baby.” And: “I thought he was hilarious; his sarcasm and humor were similar to mine.” Hersh and his sisters, Leebie and Orly, adapted well to life in Israel after the family moved from Richmond, Virginia. (Hersh was born in the Bay Area.) After being discharged from his service in the Israeli army as a combat medic, he was planning to journey around the world—a longtime dream of his. “So many people have come to love you, Hersh,” Jon Polin writes in the book’s afterword. And with one simple word that has the power to touch any heart, he signs off: “Dada.”
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217198009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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