A complex, sometimes confusing work by a talented writer.
This ambitious debut covers 15 months of a teenage boy’s prep school yearnings and traumas.
The novel’s Kennedy School is a costly coed facility modeled on Lawrenceville, also in New Jersey, from which Jenkins graduated in 2011. His narrator is a Kennedy alumnus who decides to trace the rise and fall 10 years earlier of Foster Dade, who became a school legend mainly for his expulsion for dealing Adderall and other stimulating “study drugs.” Foster is a smart, sensitive kid who’s having panic attacks about not fitting in at Kennedy. He starts selling drugs, initially prescribed by his therapist, to classmates seeking to improve their academic and athletic performance or just to supplement the buzz they usually get from booze and cocaine. (Yes, they’re only 15 and 16, but make allowances for big allowances.) Eventually he acquires a major supplier and customers on 17 campuses. He also finds friendship and affection, but several epic binges reveal a darker side of coolness, hookups, and chemically induced euphoria. Jenkins weaves through his disjointed narrative a finely observed account of teen angst and awkward sex in an academically demanding environment marked by privilege and cliques and the cruelty they breed. The disjointedness stems from a pretense of reportage set up in the alumnus narrator’s almost comically overwritten preface (“the loose nebula of half-truths has unfurled under the myth-making tendencies of time”). His intrusive commentary often interrupts the story as he explains how he knows what he knows, expanding on interviews, citing medical records. Then there are the textual jolts of age-appropriate, social media–savvy elements: Facebook threads, iChats, phone texts, iTunes playlists, and Foster’s online diary. It’s possible that Jenkins—who refers several times to coverage by Vanity Fair and other media—is aiming for a pastiche of the exposés such periodicals trot out in the wake of an eminent school’s scandal. If so, his novel suggests that fiction has a better chance of getting at more of the truth.
A complex, sometimes confusing work by a talented writer.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781419764769
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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