As much fun as Coll has with vacuum cleaners—a truly surprising amount—it's literary humor where she slays.
The wacky world of books and the people who love them, as seen through a week in the life of a Washington, D.C., bookstore.
Recently widowed bookstore owner Sophie Bernstein, 54, is trying to find her footing after the death of her beloved husband and the other disorienting events of 2017 (Charlottesville looms large), but it's not easy. For one thing, almost all the people in her life are her employees and are much younger than her. Comic novelist Coll, herself a longtime bookstore events manager, brackets this winsome midlife picaresque by placing Sophie at two young people's parties. At the opener, the youth have gathered to guzzle some vile but dangerously potent liquor (they chant “Mis…ses…Bern…stein” to get her to take a swig); at the close, they suck down Penumbra Punch at a rooftop solar eclipse party. Along the way, Sophie faces extreme drama of all kinds, from the threat of a protest over the visit of a rapacious British poet blamed for his wife's suicide to having her car towed because her keys have been sucked up by her vacuum cleaner, the fearsome Querk III. Her other vacuum cleaner, a Roomba, is the closest thing she has to a new boyfriend. Meanwhile, the book jokes don't stop coming. The fiction debut of a 25-year-old Parisian-born Afghani Irish woman titled The Girl in Gauzy Blue—of course they can't keep it in stock. A book called The Uncommon Quayle—speculative fiction featuring Vice President Dan Quayle as an undercover narcotics agent—not so much. And literally everyone Sophie meets, including a lawyer threatening suit, wants her input on a book idea. A smelly but prescient tortoise named Kurt Vonnegut Jr. recalls the rabbit of Coll's hilarious previous novel, The Stager (2014). Certain plotlines, such as one about Sophie building out a secret room in the bookstore so she will never have to go home to an empty house, don't seem to go anywhere, but, well, who wants to go anywhere?
As much fun as Coll has with vacuum cleaners—a truly surprising amount—it's literary humor where she slays.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-40023-409-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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