An entertaining and thoughtful group of stories.
Clark offers a collection of city-based short stories exploring themes of adulthood, marriage, parenthood, and loss.
These 10 vignettes excavate interior musings and relationships between spouses, parents, and children; most of the stories center around marriage. In the title story, a writer and lifelong New Yorker ponders the main character of a story he is working on as he gets his young son ready for school and reminisces about his wife. “For the Love Of Wasabi Peas” is a poignant portrait of a couple that has married three times and divorced twice as they are on the verge of their third divorce. (“When you fall in love, no matter how old you become, how many years pass, a part of you remains that age for each other forever, no matter what.”) In “His Day at the Beach” and “The Reunion,” divorced fathers grapple with the distances between them and their sons. (“I could lose her. But my kids, my boys? I had to lie down. My heart was beating so fast I thought I’d die, and I couldn’t do that and leave them unprotected.”) “The Revenge Fund” is a marked contrast; in this tale, a young woman is the only one of her friends denied entrance to a club. (“The buzzard doesn’t think she can hear him, says out the side of his mouth, ‘Face Control.’ He’s referring to her. It’s her face that’s being controlled. Being excluded, shut out.”) When she gets an unexpected and large inheritance the following week, she takes elaborate and satisfying revenge on the buzzardlike bouncer. In his first collection of short stories, Clark deftly depicts people of varying ages and perspectives. The conversations throughout are sharp and authentic, as are the interior monologues that illuminate the motives and actions of characters. For the most part, the stories take place in New York City and its environs, with witty evocations of its gruff reputation; even “A Last Stroll Through Her Favorite City,” set in Paris, includes this shout-out: “How unlike New York, a woman just smiled at me for no reason.”
An entertaining and thoughtful group of stories.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2024
ISBN: 9798990416727
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Black Note Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.
A woman faces a health crisis and obsesses over a local accident in this wonderful follow-up to Sandwich (2024).
Newman begins her latest with a quote from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know—it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.” It sets an appropriate tone for a story that is just as full of death and dread as it is laughter. Two years after the events of Sandwich, Rocky is back home in Western Massachusetts and happily surrounded by family—her daughter, Willa, lives with her and her husband, Nick, while applying to Ph.D. programs; her widowed father, Mort, has moved into the in-law apartment behind their house. When a young man who graduated from high school with Rocky’s son, Jamie, is hit by a train, Rocky finds herself spiraling as she thinks about how close the tragedy came to her own family. She’s also freaking out about a mysterious rash her dermatologist can’t explain. Both instances are tailor-made for internet research and stalking. As Rocky obsessively googles her symptoms and finds only bad news (“Here’s what’s true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don’t write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!”), she also compulsively checks the Facebook page of the accident victim’s mother. Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines (one passage about the absurdity of collecting a stool sample and delivering it to the doctor stands out). As Rocky deals with the byzantine frustrations of the medical system, she also has to learn, once more, how to see her children, husband, father, and herself as fully flawed and lovable humans.
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063453913
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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