A startling, disturbing portrait of teenage friendship.
Kim’s English debut is a descent into the dark world of a teenage girl.
Crystal lives in P City, South Korea, where she attends high school, cram school, and extra tutoring. Her life, full of intense academic pressure and economic privilege, is devoid of much adult oversight. We meet her in a living room with her best friend, Mina, and Mina’s brother, Minho. They listen to Kim Gordon, order pizza, and, as “a game, a joke,” Crystal begins to strangle Mina, leaving marks on her neck. In some ways, Crystal comes across as a typical, confused teen. She has a boyfriend who she thinks may be immature. She's a good student who feels she may merely tell adults what they want to hear. But she has a warped and widely vacillating self-image: “She is perfect because she is unfeeling and doesn’t know love." Still, Crystal may not be unique in her numbed, fragile mental state. Suicides are common among her peers, and a classmate’s suicide ruptures Mina and Crystal’s friendship. Throughout the novel, teen dialogue is rendered realistically, perhaps to a fault; it is nearly impossible to distinguish the voices of friends who come to sound so much alike. As Crystal slips further into delusions, pagelong paragraphs pull us deep into her mind, an uncomfortable, claustrophobic place to be. “There are too many people who ought to be killed,” Crystal writes in an assignment and then deletes. Kim’s prose is focused, sharp, and unflinching, even—and especially—in the novel’s gruesome scenes. We see the color of blood mixed with milk, for instance. It is “the color of strawberries.” The novel is full of such vivid details, difficult to read and more difficult to forget.
A startling, disturbing portrait of teenage friendship.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-931883-74-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A thought-provoking look at women of a certain age and the choices they make when they realize their lives aren’t exactly...
In a Marin County neighborhood, four women help each other amid marital strife, personal crises and life-altering epiphanies.
For years, Mill Valley, Calif., neighbors Gerri, Andy and Sonja have started most of their days with a brisk walk, but one early spring morning, Andy has had enough with her younger second husband, and she skips the walk and throws him out. It is a loud, angry event, but it is a long time coming, and it sets off a series of surprising upheavals in the lives of her friends. Gerri takes an unplanned trip to her husband’s office in San Francisco, and a conversation with his co-worker makes her question everything she knew about her marriage. Sonja, dedicated to New-Age strategies for health and wellness, is thrown off balance by Andy’s marital strife, then spirals into life-threatening depression when her husband leaves her. As each woman deals with her own personal crossroad, they are collectively drawn to newcomer BJ, who has never shown interest in socializing before but becomes the fresh new pair of eyes that notices change at crucial moments and steps in to help when help is most needed. Hugely popular romance author Carr (The Wanderer, 2013, etc.) steps into women’s fiction territory with this quietly powerful exploration of friendship, marriage and midlife crisis. The characters are realistic and compelling, facing life after 40 with grace, courage and a fierce interpersonal loyalty that is convincing and inspiring. The storyline sounds familiar, yet Carr handles the plot and characters with a deft hand and enough unique twists that we are invested in the characters’ well-beings, and we are touched by their struggles, especially since we see each of them at their best and their worst.
A thought-provoking look at women of a certain age and the choices they make when they realize their lives aren’t exactly what they expected—or thought they were.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1681-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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