A tender and compelling coming-of-age story.
The award-winning author of Flamer (2020) offers his first book for adults.
Curato begins his latest graphic novel by following a young man as he walks into a gay bar for the first time. AJ is naïve, close to broke, and just beginning to explore the possibilities of Seattle in the early aughts. Curato uses images to give readers a glimpse of the familial conflict that drove his protagonist from upstate New York to the Pacific Northwest. AJ catches a break when a drag queen named K takes him under her wing and introduces him to her closest friends. The Boy Luck Club includes John, who is more comfortable connecting with people through a screen than in person, and his roommate, Steven, who uses his reputation for promiscuity to hide his inner struggles. As AJ experiences the frustrations of looking for love on a dating site and the inevitable disappointments of dating in real life, his friends and mentors are always there to catch him. (Their interventions include a terrific scene in which they rescue AJ when a white date takes him to Chinatown—a sure sign of a white guy who has a fetish for Asian men—and a screening of The Joy Luck Club). This is—more than anything, perhaps—a story about how the family we’re born into may compel us to create a chosen family, and how our own experiences might inspire us to expand our circle of care. Because he’s a neophyte himself, AJ is an excellent guide to his new world. More worldly-wise characters explain the nuances of being gay and Asian in a way that feels organic while offering an invitation to readers who aren’t familiar with this world themselves. Curato’s drawing style is economical. He’s able to convey a lot of meaning with a minimum of lines, and the page layouts are varied enough to hold our interest. He also makes good use of his medium, often letting pictures tell the story.
A tender and compelling coming-of-age story.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781643755120
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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