Delicately rendered characters inform a richly textured family portrait.
A family's myths become a treasured legacy.
“How is a person made?” the young Katherine Stewart asks her older sister, Tommy. “I mean a life,” she adds, “growing up, understanding who you are and what you want. How does that happen?” That is the essential, vexing question that pervades McPhee’s thoughtful, gently told novel about the ways a family’s past shapes each generation. Tommy’s granddaughter Isadora finds the stories irresistible: A writer, she bases her novels on biographies of real people, just as McPhee has done here, drawing on her own family history. Central to the novel are Tommy and Katherine, cowed by poverty, neglected by their impetuous mother, Glenna, and longing to escape a circumscribed life. Throughout their childhood, they find themselves “elaborating and embellishing” colorful family fables, handed down by Glenna, until both felt that they “had lived not only their brief lives, but also in memories that began long before they were born.” Their own lives change dramatically in 1910 when Glenna leaves her adulterous husband, taking her daughters from their home in Ohio to Montana, where she cajoles and flirts her way into being hired as a teacher—pretending to be single, soon foisting her girls on a kindhearted childless couple. She returns after 2 years, sweeping up her daughters once again to accompany her as she continually reinvents herself. As the sisters grow up, they confront the question Katherine asked as a child: how to know who you are. McPhee underscores her characters’ evolving identities by playing with names: Tommy was born Thelma; Katherine calls herself Kate and, later, Pat; and these names, too, change—sometimes confusingly—as the narrative spins out and each sister grapples, more or less successfully, with the possibility of self-creation. “Sometimes it feels good to pretend,” Tommy reflects, “to be the person you desire, to believe you can have what you please, that what you say is the truth.”
Delicately rendered characters inform a richly textured family portrait.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7957-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A quietly profound debut that asks what we would really do if we believed we would die within the next few seconds.
The end of the world is nigh—or is it?
Cellphones all over the small Western Massachusetts town of Beckitt light up with the terrifying announcement of an incoming ballistic missile, propelling some of the town’s citizens into radical action and leaving others frozen helplessly in place. After it turns out to have been a false alarm, the fallout of those first brief moments may, in some ways, prove almost as devastating as the disaster itself would have been. Yu’s debut novel follows many characters through the time before and after that life-changing moment. Some of the characters are closely related; others come together briefly by chance, but each, in their own way, is indelibly affected by that fateful day. Among them: a mother, struggling with a secret, impetuously texts her daughter something that might cause irreparable damage. A music-school dropout and budding bluegrass musician is starting to feel he has nothing to live for when a chance encounter with a kindly server at the Anchor Grill might turn his fortune around. Across town, a normally responsible husband and father acts out of instinct, convincing his wife she’s seen his true colors and may never be able to forgive him. In the midst of the rippling effects of that choice, the man—who has spent his entire career at the PR firm his father founded—desperately grasps for a narrative that will hold his once-picture-perfect life together. For some of the characters, it’s a dramatic action that changes everything; for others, it’s the failure to act. The novel twists and turns into the private and public lives of the characters, offering a quirky, often funny, and sharply rendered peek into small-town life and the moments, large and small, that ripple out beyond our horizon of perception.
A quietly profound debut that asks what we would really do if we believed we would die within the next few seconds.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781250410122
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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