The 1970s, that most unjustly derided of decades, is evoked with intimate detail in this coming-of-age story set in an American West that is expansive with possibility yet constrained in imagination.
It's July, 1974. While President Richard Nixon is a month away from resigning in disgrace, 15-year-old Loretta dreams of a life beyond the limits imposed by her rigidly pious Mormon family in the dusty Arizona hinterlands. But just when she’s poised to break away with her secret “Gentile” boyfriend, Bradshaw, Loretta’s transgressions are found out, and her parents, believing her “soul [to be] in peril,” force her to marry Dean Harder, a fundamentalist and polygamist with an already plentiful family. Later that same auspicious summer, Dean’s teenage nephew Jason sneaks away from church with his Mormon grandpa to join the rabble watching Evel Knievel’s attempt to vault the Snake River Canyon in a rocket-powered “skycycle.” The jump fails, but Knievel’s audacity makes a resounding impression on Jason, whose path intersects with Loretta’s a year later in Idaho. Sensing in each other the same yearning to leap out of their respective cul-de-sacs of quiet desperation, they, along with Jason’s best friend, Boyd, a comparably restive if more outgoing Native American teen, set off in a LeBaron sedan for Nevada and points south for release from their lives—and, though Loretta doesn’t tell her fellow travelers, for Dean’s secret stash of gold. Vestal, who established a reputation for depicting this physical and psychic terrain in his short-story collection, Godforsaken Idaho (2013), intersperses these incidents with funny, persuasively rendered monologues by Evel Knievel himself, speaking throughout as the wounded, embittered, and caustically eternal voice of anyone whose yearning to defy his or her own fate is thwarted as much by his or her own hubris as by fate itself. Vestal also leaves you with the funny feeling that this may not be the last we see of these thrill-seeking kids—or their would-be spoilsports.
This debut novel captures the flailings and flights of hapless dreamers with prose that throbs like the strings of an electric bass playing its sad heart out in a near-desolate landscape.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-97989-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus run over a longtime acquaintance of hers—Barbara Baker, a woman she doesn't like very much—it's only the beginning of the shake-ups to come in her life and the lives of those she loves.
Astrid has been tootling along contentedly in the Hudson Valley town of Clapham, New York, a 68-year-old widow with three grown children. After many years of singlehood since her husband died, she's been quietly seeing Birdie Gonzalez, her hairdresser, for the past two years, and after Barbara's death she determines to tell her children about the relationship: "There was no time to waste, not in this life. There were always more school buses." Elliot, her oldest, who's in real estate, lives in Clapham with his wife, Wendy, who's Chinese American, and their twins toddlers, Aidan and Zachary, who are "such hellions that only a fool would willingly ask for more." Astrid's daughter, Porter, owns a nearby farm producing artisanal goat cheese and has just gotten pregnant through a sperm bank while having an affair with her married high school boyfriend. Nicky, the youngest Strick, is disconcertingly famous for having appeared in an era-defining movie when he was younger and now lives in Brooklyn with his French wife, Juliette, and their daughter, Cecelia, who's being shipped up to live with Astrid for a while after her friend got mixed up with a pedophile she met online. As always, Straub (Modern Lovers, 2016, etc.) draws her characters warmly, making them appealing in their self-centeredness and generosity, their insecurity and hope. The cast is realistically diverse, though in most ways it's fairly superficial; the fact that Birdie is Latina or Porter's obstetrician is African American doesn't have much impact on the story or their characters. Cecelia's new friend, August, wants to make the transition to Robin; that storyline gets more attention, with the two middle schoolers supporting each other through challenging times. The Stricks worry about work, money, sex, and gossip; Straub has a sharp eye for her characters' foibles and the details of their liberal, upper-middle-class milieu.
Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59463-469-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | LITERARY FICTION
Did you like this book?
In Kidd’s (The Invention of Wings, 2014, etc.) feminist take on the New Testament, Jesus has a wife whose fondest longing is to write.
Ana is the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee. She demonstrates an exceptional aptitude for writing, and Matthias, for a time, indulges her with reed pens, papyri, and other 16 C.E. office supplies. Her mother disapproves, but her aunt, Yaltha, mentors Ana in the ways of the enlightened women of Alexandria, from whence Yaltha, suspected of murdering her brutal husband, was exiled years before. Yaltha was also forced to give up her daughter, Chaya, for adoption. As Ana reaches puberty, parental tolerance of her nonconformity wanes, outweighed by the imperative to marry her off. Her adopted brother, Judas—yes, that Judas—is soon disowned for his nonconformity—plotting against Antipas. On the very day Ana, age 14, meets her prospective betrothed, the repellent Nathanial, in the town market, she also encounters Jesus, a young tradesman, to whom she’s instantly drawn. Their connection deepens after she encounters Jesus in the cave where she is concealing her writings about oppressed women. When Nathanial dies after his betrothal to Ana but before their marriage, Ana is shunned for insufficiently mourning him—and after refusing to become Antipas’ concubine, she is about to be stoned until Jesus defuses the situation with that famous admonition. She marries Jesus and moves into his widowed mother’s humble compound in Nazareth, accompanied by Yaltha. There, poverty, not sexism, prohibits her from continuing her writing—office supplies are expensive. Kidd skirts the issue of miracles, portraying Jesus as a fully human and, for the period, accepting husband—after a stillbirth, he condones Ana’s practice of herbal birth control. A structural problem is posed when Jesus’ active ministry begins—what will Ana’s role be? Problem avoided when, notified by Judas that Antipas is seeking her arrest, she and Yaltha journey to Alexandria in search of Chaya. In addition to depriving her of the opportunity to write the first and only contemporaneous gospel, removing Ana from the main action destroys the novel’s momentum.
A daring concept not so daringly developed.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-42976-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2020 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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.
