Hard but hopeful tales of middle America, addiction, and the human condition.
Residents of a Rust Belt town dream, scheme, get high, get sober, and start over in Gardner’s gritty collection of linked short stories.
“I asked my characters what they wanted and they answered: Oxycontin, Xanax, blunts, and booze.” So begins the first, titular story in Gardner’s collection; its unnamed narrator, an aspiring writer, hopes to pen a novel about the opioid epidemic, with his own addiction thinly veiled as “immersive research.” Gardner’s characters, too, desire drugs, but they want more than that: escape, a new direction, to make peace with the past and build anew. They pursue these similar ends in myriad ways. For example, the cast of “Delinquents” pins their hopes for deliverance on a homemade rocket ship; the protagonist of “Lifers, Locals, and Hangers-on,” suffocated by the monotony of her life, sees in a visiting cowboy the possibility of far-off adventure. In “Digging,” a character seeks comfort in a relationship with a younger man who’s troubled by self-loathing and fixated on a violent episode in local history. The collection’s longest story, a novella titled “Captain Failure,” focuses on a recurring character named Dunk, unveiling his traumatic past as an ex-cult member. He seeks a peace that eludes him, even in sobriety, until he’s hired to consult on a movie about the cult, forcing him to confront his childhood. It’s notable that few of Gardner’s characters ever actually leave their town of Westinghouse, Ohio; instead, they seek relief in each other, themselves, intoxication, or sobriety. The author masterfully switches up the pace with writing that’s alternately blunt, frenzied, and meditative to evoke the grinding conditions of his characters’ lives, the elasticity of time in Westinghouse, and the unique manifestations of shared desperation for something more. Gardner seems uninterested in a traditional sort of redemption for his characters, instead forcing readers to meet them on their terms. The result is a propulsive and startlingly moving collection.
Hard but hopeful tales of middle America, addiction, and the human condition.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781960593030
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Madrona Books
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.
The true story of Axis diplomats detained in the U.S. at the start of World War II is transformed into a dazzling historical novel set at a sumptuous West Virginia hotel.
Bestselling YA fantasy author Stiefvater’s adult debut introduces a writer whose prodigious imagination and distinctive prose style have combined to create a novel that will remind readers of why they fell in love with reading in the first place. At its center is the captivating June Hudson, an erstwhile Appalachian orphan who was taken in by the wealthy Gilfoyle family, owners of the Avallon Hotel & Spa, a high-society retreat built over underground mineral springs. At his death, the patriarch bequeathed ownership to his playboy son, Edgar, but made June the general manager, as she had spent her life learning the business—and also shared with Gilfoyle Sr. a rare gift relating to the “sweetwater” springs, a fantastical element of this otherwise realistic novel. Aside from the magical waters and a few other fanciful details, Stiefvater’s fictional world is based on extensive research into high-end hotels of the period, creating a version of luxury so appealing that readers will wish they could check into the Avallon and stay on indefinitely. In fact, the novel revolves around the true meaning of luxury. To June, it has nothing to do with wealth; it is more connected to joy, and to the book’s title: “June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury.” Also brilliantly managed is the rest of the ensemble cast: sexy FBI agents; June’s inimitable staff; the delegations of Japanese, Germans, and Italians detained at the hotel, some quite nasty, but among them a strange, special, totally silent child. And on top of all this, a delicious love story!
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593655504
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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