SPARKITY BONKINS

Bean presents a frantic, funny novel of consumer culture, faith, and unintended consequences.

In Greenville, South Carolina, recent college graduate Sparkity Bonkins begins her adult life with a marketing job that seems harmless: helping to develop a promotional campaign for soda brand Blue Fizz. The project centers on recruiting a couple who will be willing to conceive a future brand mascot—a child whose life will effectively be shaped by advertising, even before birth. Sparkity initially treats the assignment like any entry-level task, but the implications begin to weigh upon her mind. She becomes convinced that she’s participating in shaping a person’s destiny without their consent. Her fixation intensifies after the infant, Donald Farrell, is born. Sparkity, after losing her job, tracks his life from a distance, visiting him in various institutions, monitoring his health, and attempting interventions to improve his life. Meanwhile, she drifts through underemployment, church gatherings, strained friendships, and awkward romance. Each mundane moment circles back to the same belief: that she’s “ruined somebody’s life.” The narrative stretches across years, and its tension lies not in dramatic events and external conflict but in Sparkity’s inability to properly scale her responsibility. She treats coincidence, advertising, faith, and fate as equally causal forces, and everyday interactions—selling cotton candy, attending Bible study, speaking with acquaintances—become major, moral calculations. Donald functions less as a traditional character than as a fixed point around which Sparkity’s conscience orbits, and what emerges is a comic study of literal thinking colliding with complex systems. Bean satirizes advertising by extending its logic to absurdity: If branding shapes desire, then marketers become architects of lives. The book also gently critiques spiritual reasoning, with Sparkity’s faith comforting her but also amplifying her guilt by framing accidents as intentional designs. The humor works because the emotional core remains sincere, and Sparkity’s anxiety is exaggerated but recognizable.

A quirky moral comedy that turns consumer guilt into an oddly tender existential confession.