A crackling narrative that starts strong and ends abruptly.
A single mom and her 11-year-old daughter, who are trying to start over, move to a small New England town, but it’s harder to leave their pasts behind than they thought.
Sherri Griffin has just moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, with her daughter, Katie, and has somehow gotten her a spot in one of the more coveted summer surf day camps, much to the surprise of the long-term town moms. The first day of camp marks the beginning of Sherri's and Katie’s individual efforts to make new friends and redefine themselves—Sherri among the Mom Squad, aka The Group, which rules the social scene among the rising sixth grade parents in their little town, and Katie among those moms’ daughters. Author Moore offers a relatively standard narrative structure of rotating between a number of main characters’ points of view to tell the story. In addition to Sherri and her murky past, there is Rebecca Coleman, a second grade teacher on summer break who is struggling with grief over the sudden death of her husband 18 months before, guilt over her desire to make new friends and start dating, and irritation at her old friends; and Alexa Thornhill, Rebecca’s 17-year-old daughter, who is planning for her post–high school future on her terms and not those of her mother. Refreshingly, however, Moore also employs a breezy style to share the gossipy feel of the groupthink of the Mom Squad as an additional point of view. This is a book that tiptoes between genres. Is it a mystery? A thriller? A teen coming-of-age exegesis? A beach read that leans into a potential romantic fairy-tale ending? Surprisingly, the story elements that successfully create narrative tension and draw the reader through the volume are discarded at the close. Instead, the reader is given an ending that is as capricious as life itself.
A crackling narrative that starts strong and ends abruptly.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-284009-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Never sentimental, never predictable, this aptly titled novel illuminates dark passages both fictional and real.
A troubled American family suffers an insuperable loss during a year abroad.
While Choi’s latest—a domestic drama with deep roots in 75 years of geopolitics—has little in common with her previous novel, the National Book Award–winning coming-of-age story Trust Exercise (2019), it does share one characteristic with that book: Only so much can be said about its explosively twisty plot without spoilers. What’s sort of amazing is that a novel with such a locomotive of a plot—and give it a chance, because it doesn’t rev up right away—could just as reasonably be described as character-driven, devoted to unfurling the personalities and destinies of its three point-of-view characters, Serk, Anne, and Louisa Kang. Serk is an ethnic Korean born in Japan; his family was among those thrust into chaos by the regime changes of the 1940s and he ends up moving on his own to the United States to purse an academic career. There he meets Anne, a white Midwesterner whose teenage fling with a married man resulted in the birth of a son she barely saw before he was taken away; 10 years later, her marriage to Serk produces a daughter, Louisa, who’s at the center of the storm that is this novel. Though she is never a happy or easy child, her life will go from merely bad to unbearable in the middle of fourth grade, when she’s forced to go to Japan for her father’s visiting professorship. While Serk and Louisa are walking by the sea one night, something happens. The girl is found half-dead on the beach with few clear memories, and her father has disappeared; it is concluded that he has drowned. Louisa and Anne have many more challenges over the decades ahead, including serious chronic illness for Anne and a nearly disastrous college trip to Europe for Louisa, but one thing they will never have is a real connection. This is not an easy novel, but it has important things to say, and Choi is a writer you can trust to make the journey worthwhile.
Never sentimental, never predictable, this aptly titled novel illuminates dark passages both fictional and real.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780374616373
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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