Some interesting ideas don’t mesh well with a whole lot of melodrama.
Summers in Puglia forge fraught bonds between a privileged girl from Turin and three local boys in a through-the-years saga jam-packed with events.
Bern, Nicola, and Tommaso live on the farm adjacent to Teresa's grandmother’s home, and Teresa is fascinated by the trio from the instant she spots them taking an illicit nighttime swim in her grandmother’s pool when she's 14. By the time she’s 17, she and Bern are lovers, which arouses Nicola’s and particularly Tommaso’s jealousy. Bern’s devotion to Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees none-too-subtly flags him as given to extremes, and as the novel flashes forward to 2012, Tommaso’s drunken revelations to 32-year-old Teresa reveal that the boys’ bond was closer and weirder than she ever knew. Then we’re whisked back to 2003, when Teresa inherits her grandmother’s estate, which includes the farm where Bern, Tommaso, and some new friends—Nicola glaringly not among them—are now squatting. Still fixated on Bern, Teresa joins their commune devoted to sustainable living and guerrilla activism in defense of the environment. Incident piles on top of incident: The commune breaks up; Teresa and Bern have trouble conceiving a child and decide to get married to raise money for infertility treatments; those don’t work, so she sets Bern free by pretending she’s been unfaithful. What all this has to do with the insistently reiterated theme of Bern’s yearning for absolutes is murky—until Tommaso’s confession resumes, and readers learn what drove Bern to the act that results in his fleeing Italy. His final meeting with Teresa has touching moments, muffled by the extreme improbability of the circumstances. Grappling with material similar to Richard Powers’ masterful The Overstory (2018), Giordano gets bogged down in plot and fails to persuasively convey his characters’ ideological passions. Bern remains an enigma, as does Teresa’s devotion to him.
Some interesting ideas don’t mesh well with a whole lot of melodrama.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984877-31-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Hilarious, grotesque, and standing slightly in the shadow of its sibling.
Awad returns to the world of Bunny (2019), armed with her signature satirical and surrealist flair.
Samantha Heather Mackey has written a novel, and when she arrives on the dreamy and violent campus of Warren University, where she got her MFA, for her book tour, her fellow former students known as the Bunnies kidnap her and confront her about her thinly veiled autobiographical debut. Now the Bunnies are finally getting their say—and, boy, are they talkative. Offering a kaleidoscopic view of what went down before, during, and after the events chronicled in Bunny, the girls can’t contain their rage, disgust, jealousy, boredom, and hurt over Samantha and her novel. Eventually, Aerius, the Bunnies’ “First Boy. First Draft. First Darling.…First humiliation,” cuts in to offer his side of the story: How he came to be; his understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world; and how he causes, circumvents, and fits into the events of and beyond the first novel. Though he avoids the Bunnies (his “Keepers”) at all costs, they yearn and search for him, their finest work—even if you account for his bloody, violent streak. Considering whether Aerius was the town’s deranged murderer, they slyly say, “But ultimately, we simply did not think so, no. Because he’d come from us and we were lovely. As has already been stated.” This novel is at its best when musing about creativity, writing, and “the work”; skewering academia and elitism; and straddling the slippery border between reality and fantasy. Billed as a standalone, it is most successful as a companion to its predecessor, though at times it reveals too much about the mysterious lore and elusive dynamics of the first novel. Awad’s pacing is uneven, but she sticks the landing with a delightfully unexpected and unhinged ending. Her wit, humor, and metafictional prowess are on full display in this prequel, sequel, expanded upside-down revision, or whatever you want to call it.
Hilarious, grotesque, and standing slightly in the shadow of its sibling.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668059869
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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