An absurd romp through modern culture with a disarmingly appealing protagonist.
In Bonapace’s satirical novel, a young woman embarks on a strange journey from New Jersey to Bulgaria and back again.
Cristina Acqualina “Tina” Bontempi lives in a flood-prone, illegally rented basement apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, where she barely scrapes by as a realtor. She spends her time smoking cannabis and working out with her fitness-obsessed friend-with-benefits, Steve. Her whole life changes after he gives her a copy of The Bulgarian Training Manual, a physical and mental fitness guide “kept secret by the Communists.” Tina dabbles in some of the manual’s self-help schemes, including a communion-wafer diet (popularized by a 14th-century nun who “helped unify Italy and brought the Pope back to Rome, all the while eating her way across Europe with communion wafers”) and “Hypno-Tan” sessions, which involve a tanning bed and hypnotism. Eventually, she realizes that, despite the “secret” nature of the manual, a surprising number of people at her gym are aware of its existence. She becomes captivated by its teachings, and she finally makes an impulsive decision to fly to Bulgaria to help “restore the Ancient Gym to its place of honor.” After she arrives, she meets a host of quirky characters, including a woman known as Baba Yaga who immediately offers her a communion wafer (“‘Eat,’ she says, ‘but never on the same day as candy corn. It is ancient Bulgarian way’”) and Mohawk, another fitness fanatic who worships the manual’s teachings—and who believes that vital pages are missing from it. It doesn’t take long before some people, including Baba Yaga, suspect that Tina may hold the key to unlocking the guide’s full potential.
As this summary indicates, Bonapace is clearly uninterested in constructing a narrative based in reality. Instead, she presents a tale of a determined protagonist on a weird, winding path toward self-fulfillment, while skewering everything from diet culture and religion to beauty trends and gym bros. Tina’s tough New Jersey attitude sometimes edges a bit too close to parody, but as she apparently bumbles her way toward enlightenment, her brash, unapologetic air makes the story of her hotheaded journey to Bulgaria worth reading. The dialogue is about as realistic as it can be, considering the utterly absurd topics that the characters discuss. But it’s Tina’s narration that proves to be the most entertaining element, as when she ruminates on why Romeo and Juliet has endured: “It said right in the prologue that the play would take two hours. That’s a lot of useful information. Most books don’t do that…Think about it. Shakespeare is still around after all these years for a reason.” Over the course of the novel, there are plenty of moments that will make readers laugh out loud, including the manual’s guide to various bodybuilder meal plans, including a feeding tube diet, a baby food diet, and a virtual diet (in which one simply pretends to eat). It’s a wild ride that’s most fun when readers put their assumptions aside.
An absurd romp through modern culture with a disarmingly appealing protagonist.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781960988102
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Clash Books
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© 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.
