It’s not hard to understand the temptation to rework this oft-told tale, but the result of this exercise is disappointing.
The author of Forty Rooms (2016) takes on Cinderella.
“Cinderella” is one of the most-often-told tales in the world. In this iteration of the familiar story, the heroine has been married to her prince long enough to want to murder him. Grushin is not the first to wonder what comes after happily-ever-after, of course, and she's aware of this. She uses the last stanza of Anne Sexton’s “Cinderella” as an epigram. This may not have been a wise choice, as Sexton’s 10 lines are ultimately more satisfying than Grushin’s 288 pages. This novel occupies an uncomfortable place between realism, postmodernism, and folklore. Part of the appeal of Cinderella—part of the appeal of all folkloric heroines—is that she's a blank screen onto which we can project our own selves and our own desires. This sort of protagonist works for long enough to sustain a fairy tale, but a novel typically requires a protagonist who emerges as a real person. Grushin’s Cinderella has enough of an inner life to make her specific—rather than universal—but not enough to emerge as a fully developed character. There’s an analogous issue of narrative voice. Fairy tales don’t feel like pure exposition because they are set in an eternal past and because they are short. Grushin isn’t the first author to try to refresh this style by adding a surfeit of adjectives and metaphors, but neither is she more successful than her predecessors. Maybe the most noteworthy thing about this novel is that its author has already written a much better one that asks the questions it seems to want to pose. Forty Rooms was, among other things, an extended meditation on what autonomy, identity, and purpose mean for women. It’s also worth noting that when working with—against?—the formal constraints of a story set in Soviet Russia and suburban America, Grushin conjures more magic than she does in the fantasy world of this novel.
It’s not hard to understand the temptation to rework this oft-told tale, but the result of this exercise is disappointing.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-08550-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.
The Red River of the North cuts a vivid track through the hardscrabble lives that anchor Erdrich’s surpassing North Dakota fiction.
This deft, almost winsome novel begins at night, with Crystal Frechette, a trucker. She’s hauling sugar beets and wearing “a lucky hat knitted by her daughter,” Kismet Poe. Her headlights are “peacefully cutting radiant holes in the blackness” when she glimpses a mountain lion vault across the road. It’s a sign, but of what? Kismet, finishing high school, is edgy, furious, and bored. Both Gary Geist, her school’s quarterback, and Hugo Dumach, a nerdy home-schooler, fixate on her as the angel destined to slay their wildly divergent demons. This nutty love triangle kickstarts the plot; Kismet, in a futile stab at avoiding teen marriage, slips from a bridge into the cold Red River, floating downstream until she’s rescued. But true love here is the kind between mother and daughter. This pair, beset by the 2008 economic meltdown, proves expert in “getting trapped but at least not giving up.” Around them, a recent, communal catastrophe on the frozen river stays murky through three-quarters of the story. In counterpoint, the town’s daffy book club dissects Eat Pray Love and The Road, each session blooming into comic set pieces. Erdrich reaches for some of her fictional staples: a waitressing gig, multiple viewpoints, and, always, mixed-heritage Native people trying to grasp and transmit that heritage. Her writing feels both effortless and wise. She notes a boy’s “shy armpits” and how a soundproofed house can feel “inhuman, maybe even violent.” Even if a minor character, the Catholic priest, bogs down in caricature, Erdrich has few equals in braiding landscape and sky into the marrow of her characters. Her poet’s origins are in full force as she folds in the sickening damage of fracking and pesticide-dependent agriculture, right alongside the sprouts of resistance.
In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780063277052
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
