Despite some lovely prose, Friedman’s dystopia-lite comes across as less shocking than shallow.
A first novel about the travails of a young Louisiana woman mourning her mother’s death in the 2040s, when human burial has become illegal.
The near future Friedman creates is less extreme than ones found in other recent cautionary dystopias. Instead, what may scare readers is how normal narrator Alma’s world seems in light of the U.S.'s current problems. In fact, 22-year-old Alma's lifestyle and entertainment references—the same fast food, the same golden oldies considered oldies today—make the fabric of daily life in the present and future seem pretty much the same. One change mentioned more than once is that Louisiana’s football teams have stopped playing. And of course there are the continuing ravages of climate change—trees lost to storms, hoarding due to empty store shelves. Parts of Louisiana are uninhabitable. Alma’s major concern, however, is that the increasingly authoritarian government—its political affiliation left ambiguous—has taken control of graveyard land; laws now require the dead to be cremated, their ashes stored by the state, with few exceptions. Alma takes up the cause of dead people’s rights and freedom of burial choice. Her mother, who died a year earlier, was cremated although she’d wanted a burial. After Alma’s application for a dispensation to keep the urn of her mother’s ashes is turned down, she becomes involved with a secret idealistic group of Catholic burial rights activists. She also takes in homeless, pregnant 19-year-old Bordelon, who is mourning the death of the grandmother who raised her. Both Bordelon and Alma had lousy boyfriends and fathers who abandoned them; their activist friend Josephine’s husband abused her. More problematic than the heavy-handed victimhood is the narrowness of Alma’s vision, which seems unconcerned with major issues like racism or deaths caused by natural disasters and starvation. But the temptation to consider this a satirical fable is undercut by the earnest tone.
Despite some lovely prose, Friedman’s dystopia-lite comes across as less shocking than shallow.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2939-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.
A woman faces a health crisis and obsesses over a local accident in this wonderful follow-up to Sandwich (2024).
Newman begins her latest with a quote from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know—it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.” It sets an appropriate tone for a story that is just as full of death and dread as it is laughter. Two years after the events of Sandwich, Rocky is back home in Western Massachusetts and happily surrounded by family—her daughter, Willa, lives with her and her husband, Nick, while applying to Ph.D. programs; her widowed father, Mort, has moved into the in-law apartment behind their house. When a young man who graduated from high school with Rocky’s son, Jamie, is hit by a train, Rocky finds herself spiraling as she thinks about how close the tragedy came to her own family. She’s also freaking out about a mysterious rash her dermatologist can’t explain. Both instances are tailor-made for internet research and stalking. As Rocky obsessively googles her symptoms and finds only bad news (“Here’s what’s true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don’t write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!”), she also compulsively checks the Facebook page of the accident victim’s mother. Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines (one passage about the absurdity of collecting a stool sample and delivering it to the doctor stands out). As Rocky deals with the byzantine frustrations of the medical system, she also has to learn, once more, how to see her children, husband, father, and herself as fully flawed and lovable humans.
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063453913
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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