by Marlowe Granados ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 2021
Like the many cocktails sipped by our discerning narrator: effervescent, tart, and intoxicating.
A pair of beautiful, undocumented party girls live the high life in New York...though they literally do not know where their next meal is coming from.
As this glamorous, intelligent debut novel opens, 21-year-old best friends Isa and Gala land in New York to spend the summer. They plan to use their pretty faces as passports to the New York demimonde and to make grocery money by selling dresses at a market stall. Since the latter turns out to be quite the losing operation, they are constantly looking for gigs that pay cash. As audience members at a TV shoot, they "only get fifty dollars each, but collectively, that's at least one late-night cab home, a dozen oysters during happy hour, a small bottle of Tanqueray, and maybe one unlimited seven-day MetroCard." They respond to ads looking for foot models and makeup shoots, one seeking "a pair of friends, one of whom had to be Diverse." ("Diverse" is about all we ever really know about Isa's background; Gala, we learn in a throwaway remark, was a Bosnian baby refugee.) Being members of what one acquaintance calls the "precariat" can be exhausting. When the girls try to improve their minds by attending a boring lecture on the new Belle Epoque touted in the New Yorker, Gala wonders, "Do you think they have a list of who's in the One Percent?" It would certainly make things more efficient. The book, Isa's putative diary, is chock-full of aperçus. On the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn: "Being far away from a subway station must be conducive to making art." On a typical New York conversation: “two people waiting for their turn to talk.” On the aloof brutes Isa's always fallen for: "The mind reels with all the possibilities of what they might feel or think about you. Usually it is nothing like what you expect and much less complex than the thoughts you generously assign to them." The girls have known each other since they were at least 16 (that's when Isa spent six months living in Gala's bedroom and Gala got her tooth knocked out at a rave), but this summer will test their friendship and propel them into their next chapters.
Like the many cocktails sipped by our discerning narrator: effervescent, tart, and intoxicating.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-83976-4-011
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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by Catherine Newman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 2024
A moving, hilarious reminder that parenthood, just like life, means constant change.
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During an annual beach vacation, a mother confronts her past and learns to move forward.
Her family’s annual trip to Cape Cod is always the highlight of Rocky’s year—even more so now that her children are grown and she cherishes what little time she gets with them. Rocky is deep in the throes of menopause, picking fights with her loving husband and occasionally throwing off her clothes during a hot flash, much to the chagrin of her family. She’s also dealing with her parents, who are crammed into the same small summer house (with one toilet that only occasionally spews sewage everywhere) and who are aging at an alarmingly rapid rate. Rocky’s life is full of change, from her body to her identity—she frequently flashes back to the vacations of years past, when her children were tiny. Although she’s grateful for the family she has, she mourns what she’s lost. Newman (author of the equally wonderful We All Want Impossible Things, 2022) imbues Rocky’s internal struggles with importance and gravity, all while showcasing her very funny observations about life and parenting. She examines motherhood with a raw honesty that few others manage—she remembers the hard parts, the depths of despair, panic, and anxiety that can happen with young children, and she also recounts the joy in a way that never feels saccharine. She has a gift for exploring the real, messy contradictions in human emotions. As Rocky puts it, “This may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel.”
A moving, hilarious reminder that parenthood, just like life, means constant change.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780063345164
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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by Kaveh Akbar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 2024
Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart.
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A philosophical discourse inside an addiction narrative, all wrapped up in a quest novel.
Poet Akbar's debut in fiction features Cyrus Shams, a child of the Midwest and of the Middle East. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother, Roya, a passenger on a domestic flight in Iran, was killed by a mistakenly fired U.S. missile. His father, Ali, who after Roya died moved with Cyrus to small-town Indiana and worked at a poultry factory farm, has also died. Cyrus disappeared for a time into alcoholism and drugs. Now on the cusp of 30, newly sober but still feeling stuck in his college town, Cyrus becomes obsessed with making his life matter, and he conceives of a grand poetic project, The Book of Martyrs (at the completion of which, it seems, he may commit suicide). By chance, he discovers online a terminally ill Iranian American artist, Orkideh, who has decided to live out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum, having candid tête-à-têtes with the visitors who line up to see her, and Cyrus—accompanied by Zee, his friend and lover, who's understandably a bit alarmed by all this—embarks on a quest to visit and consult with and learn from her. The novel is talky, ambitious, allusive, deeply meditative, and especially good in its exploration of Cyrus as not being between ethnic or national identities but inescapably, radically both Persian and American. It succeeds so well on its own terms that the novel's occasional flaws—big coincidences, forays into other narrators that sometimes fall flat, dream-narratives, occasional small grandiosities—don't mar the experience in any significant way.
Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593537619
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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