An intense, unflinching, and sometimes-dispiriting analysis of gender roles.
Montgomery grapples with the complexities of being a woman in a patriarchal society in this memoiristic essay collection.
As a girl, the author looked to her intrepid aunt for subversive lessons on surviving in a man’s world. Silenced by adults, harassed by boys, and unsettled by her parents’ contentious marriage, she sought solace in the controlled world of her Polly Pocket toys. At school, she noticed the contradictory dress code by which boys were allowed to wear tank tops and sandals, while girls were forced into PTA-approved gym outfits, “shrouding [their] bodies like a secret, like shame.” Girls were “praised for disappearing” and shrank themselves with exercise and eating disorders. Montgomery’s mother urged her to “Hug your mad” and keep her face expressionless. The love affair between Leonardo DiCaprio’s and Kate Winslet’s characters in the movie Titanic became the romantic template for the author’s peers. In college, she connected “untrustworthy” female characters in literature to the way that women are socialized to doubt themselves around men. The author also shares a multitude of experiences in which men forced their bodies into her personal space—on planes, the street, in a grocery store, at a funeral. Montgomery offers incisive critique in this powerful first-person narrative in which “girlhood is a performance, womanhood even more so.” Indeed, the unrelentingly bleak tone of the collection may leave some readers wondering if there is any hope for women and girls in modern society. Throughout, she expertly eases readers into each vignette before pulling back the veil to reveal trauma and injustice, as in a story of a planetarium visit in which Orion’s Belt reminded her of “the one my parents use to spank me if I am naughty.” In vivid imagery, she shows how gender dynamics manifest, conjuring schoolboys in a classroom who “send their hands soaring like rockets into the sky,” only to answer questions incorrectly.
An intense, unflinching, and sometimes-dispiriting analysis of gender roles.Pub Date: May 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781957248509
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Small Harbor Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
