Guaranteed to make your heart beat faster.
A Chicago medical student is disillusioned by love until she meets a passionate artist in this debut novel.
As a third-year medical student, Ghanaian American narrator Angela Appiah practically wrote the textbook on firstborn-daughter expectations. At 25, Angie still has little room for failure under the watchful eyes of her parents, who expect nothing less than perfection. Unfortunately, perfection is sorely lacking in Angie’s personal life; for starters, she just got dumped by her boyfriend of six months. Her sister, Tabatha, insists that Angie’s constant heartbreak is due to her choosing to date the “low-hanging fruit” who label her an “ethnic, erudite fling.” That said, Angie can’t help but dream of white coats more than white weddings when there are future-defining tests to study for. Enter Ricky Gutiérrez, a handsome young graphic designer she meets in a public garden. She’s immediately smitten: He’s flirtatious, kind, and way too good to be true—which Angie finds out is not a metaphor when he reveals he has a girlfriend. While Angie would like nothing more than to forget her chance meeting with Ricky, fate keeps bringing them together. He volunteers at the pediatric ward in the hospital where she performs her rotations; his best friend, Shae, is in love with her best friend, Nia; and he even has tickets to the same Beyoncé concert. The more time Angie spends with Ricky, the less she can fight her overwhelming attraction toward him, but is she willing to let herself get hurt by him again? Author Obuobi, a physician and cartoonist, is in her wheelhouse chronicling the hectic, and sometimes solitary, life of a medical student. The often witty footnotes, frequently describing medical jargon or Ghanaian traditions, add an amusing flair to Angie’s personality, but the novel’s true strength shines in its more serious moments. Encounters with Ricky’s father, who’s overdosing on heroin, and a 15-year-old gunshot victim powerfully depict the heartbreaking realities that are commonplace in Angie's line of work and how her passion for helping people is where her true success lies.
Guaranteed to make your heart beat faster.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-320914-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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