These ingenious and lovable stories crack open the world.
Tragedies big and small are faced with indomitable wit in 12 stories.
The subjects of Perabo’s (The Broken Places, 2001, etc.) stories range from the slightly dark to the really tough. On the lighter side: middle school students blackmail their teacher after witnessing her messing around with the principal; a child gives her stuffed armadillo the name of her mother’s ex-lover; a lonely woman’s one good friend announces plans to leave town. At the blacker end, there’s a story that begins “My mother was thrilled to be dying of brain cancer after a lifetime of smoking.” Or “The boy fell from the balcony sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning.” Both of those stories—in fact, each of the stories about death in the book—use metafictional elements in a way reminiscent of George Saunders, to illuminate the function of story in our lives, its power and its helplessness. In “Story Goes,” which gives The Fault in Our Stars a run for its money in the voice department, a teenage cancer patient tries to help a friend commit suicide. “If you close your eyes and listen very hard you can actually hear, through years and miles, my 15-year-old brain creaking forward like a long dormant watermill while I process this massive amount of new and confusing information.” Perabo’s facility with teenage narrators also shines in “Treasure,” about a plane crash witnessed from a high school football field and a good crush gone bad. “If life really can be compared to a hand of cards, I’m fairly certain that those cards remain facedown until sixth or seventh grade and only then do you get to turn them over and see who you actually are.” Stealth wisdom is the hallmark of this collection, hiding in each piece like the prize in a Cracker Jack box. As a former bike racer tells his catastrophizing friend in the title story, “Everybody gets to be a little pathetic. But you can’t have more than your share, or there’s not enough to go around. You can’t be a hog about it.”
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6143-5
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface.
Ng's nuanced debut novel begins with the death of a teenage girl and then uses the mysterious circumstances of her drowning as a springboard to dive into the troubled waters beneath the calm surface of her Chinese-American family.
When 16-year-old Lydia Lee fails to show up at breakfast one spring morning in 1977, and her body is later dragged from the lake in the Ohio college town where she and her biracial family don't quite fit in, her parents—blonde homemaker Marilyn and Chinese-American history professor James—older brother and younger sister get swept into the churning emotional conflicts and currents they've long sought to evade. What, or who, compelled Lydia—a promising student who could often be heard chatting happily on the phone; was doted on by her parents; and enjoyed an especially close relationship with her Harvard-bound brother, Nath—to slip away from home and venture out in a rowboat late at night when she had always been deathly afraid of water, refusing to learn to swim? The surprising answers lie deep beneath the surface, and Ng, whose stories have won awards including the Pushcart Prize, keeps an admirable grip on the narrative's many strands as she expertly explores and exposes the Lee family's secrets: the dreams that have given way to disappointment; the unspoken insecurities, betrayals and yearnings; the myriad ways the Lees have failed to understand one another and, perhaps, themselves. These long-hidden, quietly explosive truths, weighted by issues of race and gender, slowly bubble to the surface of Ng's sensitive, absorbing novel and reverberate long after its final page.
Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface.Pub Date: June 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-571-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Just the thing for those who want their New Age nostrums wrapped in medieval kit.
If you don’t have a woeful countenance already, this knight’s tale will slap one on you right quick.
It’s 1483, and down in Cornwall, a knight is writing a farewell to his children against the possibility that he may fall in battle in a war against the Thane of Cawdor. Not the one whose title King Macbeth usurped 400 years earlier, it would seem—though, given the anachronistic nature of this book, anything’s possible. Take, for instance, a moment just a few pages in, when our seasoned and grown-up knight, settling into his yarn, recalls that the knight to whom he apprenticed as a young man began his tutelage with a nice cuppa. That’s all very well and good, except that tea was unknown in the Middle Ages; a stickler will tell you that it first turns up a century and a half after the events actor/novelist Hawke (Ash Wednesday, 2002, etc.) recounts. That’s either magical realism or sloppiness, both of which this latest effort abounds in. Take the nostrum that Good Sir Knight Senior imparts to Junior: “You are better than no one, and no one is better than you.” All very nicely egalitarian, that, but a bit out of step with the elaborate hierarchy of medieval equerry and nobility. And more: “The simple joys are the great ones. Pleasure is not complicated.” Tell it to Abelard and Heloise, oh Obi-Wan. Elsewhere Hawke merrily (and again anachronistically) stuffs in a well-known Buddhist tale, the punch line to which is, “I set that boy down hours ago, but I see you are still carrying him.” Ah, well. By all appearances, Hawke aspires to write a modern Siddhartha, but what we wind up with is more along the lines of watered-down Mitch Albom—and that’s a very weak cup of tea indeed.
Just the thing for those who want their New Age nostrums wrapped in medieval kit.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-96233-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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