A candid portrait of athletes’ endurance and women’s friendships.
Six young women, competitive cross-country runners, strain to keep their lives on track.
On a Massachusetts college campus in 1992, there are no cheerleaders for the women’s cross-country team. The student-athletes have each other, and they are classic teammates: yoked frenemies and diehard loyalists. A collective narrator takes inventory of the top six: “Chloe is the fastest, and Kristin is the prettiest, and Liv has a boyfriend, and Harriet is the smartest, the most ambitious, and Patricia sees through the bullshit, and Danielle cares the most. She is the most responsible.” (Harriet is also a lesbian, and her subplot is worthy of its own book.) All crave food—unsurprising since the coaches do regular weigh-ins—and both disordered eating and binge-drinking plague the team. Reents focuses on the characters’ personal and athletic pain, so we don’t know much about their classes or career plans. But the runners, who are sharp and clever, take spirited positions on sexual politics, slippery language, Anita Hill, and Andrea Dworkin. Over scenic practice runs and social breaks, subsets of the six try to solve each other’s problems, with mixed results. Given this tight focus, we rarely glimpse coaches, parents, professors, or non-jock friends. Team captain Danielle is mostly on her own as she tries to steer her teammates toward top performance, good moods, and low drama. Of course, she too is a college student with pressures, and carries her own regrets. The story is told in three parts, two during the season and one as a flashback to Kristin’s previous summer in Boise, where she worked as a barista and met a suspiciously charming man in his late 20s. Here, Reents’ writing ramps up, and the stakes are high. Her descriptions of the Idaho landscape are bewitching, and the dialogue is rivetingly strange. A cross-country veteran herself, Reents brings suspense and precision to the running scenes, putting the reader in the center of the action. The novel’s resolution is anticlimactic, but the heroism of women with a common cause, in a world of men who think they know best, makes for a moving narrative.
A candid portrait of athletes’ endurance and women’s friendships.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9780593448069
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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