A poetic premise with language to match.
At the very top of the world, two lonely outsiders find comfort in each other in Dinerstein’s deliciously melancholy debut.
After her college relationship predictably disintegrates, 21-year-old Frances, an aspiring artist, accepts an apprenticeship at the Viking Museum in Lofoten, a string of islands 95 miles above the Arctic Circle in Norway, trading in a summer watching her parents’ marriage unravel for a summer learning to paint all-yellow murals under the tutelage of the strong and silent Nils. Meanwhile, 17-year-old Yasha and his beloved baker-father, Vassily (“if the Danishes are sour, one babka on me”), gleefully ditch their home in Brighton Beach to take a summer trip back to the motherland. But the trip, such as it was, ends in tragedy, and Yasha, too, finds himself in Lofoten, now unmoored and unattached. And so Frances and Yasha—united by their separate losses, united by being the sorts of people who deal with those losses by building new and inherently temporary lives at an Arctic Viking Museum—fall into an unlikely kind of romance. Dinerstein’s writing is light and lyrical, and her descriptions of the far north are intoxicating. Yasha and Frances and the cast of sitcom-ready Norwegian misfits who staff the museum are engaging and sad and quirky, if not particularly substantial. It hardly matters, though, because the heart and soul of the novel belongs to the fathers: Yasha’s father, with his bakery and his deep optimism and his broken heart, and Frances’ father, a colossally talented medical illustrator who, in late middle age, seems to be methodically disassembling the life he’s built. As the rest of the novel fades into memory, it’s the fathers, in their supporting roles, who linger long after the last page.
A poetic premise with language to match.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-112-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
In the contest of Most Winning Combination, it would be hard to beat grumpy Ove and his hidden, generous heart.
Originally published in Sweden, this charming debut novel by Backman should find a ready audience with English-language readers.
The book opens helpfully with the following characterizations about its protagonist: “Ove is fifty-nine. He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman’s torch.” What the book takes its time revealing is that this dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon has a heart of solid gold. Readers will see the basic setup coming a mile away, but Backman does a crafty job revealing the full vein of precious metal beneath Ove’s ribs, glint by glint. Ove’s history trickles out in alternating chapters—a bleak set of circumstances that smacks an honorable, hardworking boy around time and again, proving that, even by early adulthood, he comes by his grumpy nature honestly. It’s a woman who turns his life around the first time: sweet and lively Sonja, who becomes his wife and balances his pessimism with optimism and warmth. By 59, he's in a place of despair yet again, and it’s a woman who turns him around a second time: spirited, knowing Parvaneh, who moves with her husband and children into the terraced house next door and forces Ove to engage with the world. The back story chapters have a simple, fablelike quality, while the current-day chapters are episodic and, at times, hysterically funny. In both instances, the narration can veer toward the preachy or overly pat, but wry descriptions, excellent pacing and the juxtaposition of Ove’s attitude with his deeds add plenty of punch to balance out any pathos.
In the contest of Most Winning Combination, it would be hard to beat grumpy Ove and his hidden, generous heart.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3801-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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