With X-ray-vision, empathy, and vivacity under fire, DeWoskin once again finds literary gold in painful circumstances.
A breast cancer diagnosis kicks off a feral midlife crisis for a mild-mannered poetry professor.
Samantha Baxter, 42, has a great husband and daughter in college, a successfully published volume of poetry, a good job teaching in a college town. She also has breast cancer and is scheduled for a double mastectomy in three weeks. Almost immediately, she finds herself in a bathtub caressing the soapy hip of one of her students, a redhead named Leah, a girl about her daughter’s age. “My life dissolved like an old-fashioned slide show catching fire,” she explains. “I just got sick and wanted to burn the world down.” For the nearly 300 pages of DeWoskin’s (Someday We Will Fly, 2019, etc.) impassioned rant of a novel, the inside of Samantha’s head rages like an inferno. After the stress of conducting the poetry workshop in which her new lover is a student, she wants “to hide inside Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, to stop my mind from thinking its own language and instead live in hers,” but instead she pitches herself into the affair with willfully self-destructive and self-indulgent intensity. Her kind husband, her beloved daughter, and her mother, a breast cancer survivor, watch helplessly from the sidelines. “If anyone thinks her tenancy in the land of the sane and healthy was reliable, she should probably think again, because our bodies and minds have a million shards and parts, so many in contradiction with each other that we cannot count on ourselves not to revolt against ourselves.” The narration of this book is so engaging and powerful and the confusion and despair Samantha experiences so visceral and terrifying, reading it feels like being dragged along by the hand by one’s braver best friend through a scary fun house. Surely she can get us out of here, you think, but you can’t be sure.
With X-ray-vision, empathy, and vivacity under fire, DeWoskin once again finds literary gold in painful circumstances.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-94834-010-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Dottir Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
© Copyright 2025 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.
