An often warm, if tonally inconsistent, work about finding inspiration where one least expects it.
In Broome’s debut novel, a nonreligious young woman falls for a charismatic fundamentalist.
Nikki Lowe has been a public school biology teacher in Jackson, Mississippi, for three years, but she’s looking forward to a welcome change of pace: At summer’s end, she’ll start teaching literature at a small university. Her one remaining obligation is to attend a science education seminar, and although her friends tease her that she might meet the man of her dreams there, she laughs it off: “She wasn’t on the rebound after a wrenching breakup. She was neutral, which was to say, she was happy being alone.” However, she ends up meeting a handsome, poetry-quoting man named Cory Thomas at the conference. They hit it off wonderfully during subsequent dates, even after Nikki, who’s not religious, learns that Cory is a devout Christian. “What if he asks me to go to church?” she asks herself, coming to the conclusion that she can “just go through the motions like everyone else.” Things are complicated by the fact that Nikki just recently fought a long battle at her old school with a creationist faculty member who was told that “creationism is not science. It’s faith-based, and it belongs in church, not the state-supported classroom.” One of Nikki’s friends even says that “Christianity hates knowledge. Always has.” However, she sets aside her reservations when Cory invites her to become a nature counselor at Silverbridge, a summer camp that he runs for Christian girls. Nonetheless, plenty of drama ensues.
“I suppose the best description of someone like me is secular humanist, but I don't say that with a great degree of certainty,” Nikki tells the friendly family of Silverbridge’s groundskeeper. “I reserve the right to be spiritual. I love mystery.” Broome does a fine job of providing such mystery for her, and making it believable; he also convincingly portrays the protagonist’s subtle spiritual awakenings during her brief time at Silverbridge, as she teaches a group of young girls and learns about their problems and dreams. The book’s opening feints toward a fairly simple Christian-conversion plot quickly give way to something much more intriguing, as Nikki discovers darkness at Silverbridge. Broome has a smoothly natural narrative voice and a talent for conveying characters with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of believability. Even comparatively minor players—the friend who looks after Nikki’s dog while she’s away, the live-in girlfriend of Nikki’s aunt—are effectively brought to life. Intriguingly, Cory is the only character who never quite seems to ignite, but Nikki herself is such a well-turned figure that this fact isn’t sufficient to sink the book’s latter sections. Some of what unfolds in the second half of the book, which includes shocking violence, verges on excessive melodrama; indeed, that melodrama is a large part of what makes Cory unconvincing as a character. However, the story of Nikki’s development more than compensates for this, making for a compelling reading experience.
An often warm, if tonally inconsistent, work about finding inspiration where one least expects it.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-65546-659-5
Page Count: 490
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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