Even when Peters’ experiments don’t pay off, it’s exciting to read an author willing to take these risks.
Three long stories and a short novel by the author of Detransition, Baby (2021).
In her debut, Peters told the story of a trans woman and her ex-lover—formerly a trans woman, now living again as a man—building a family together with the latter’s new partner, a cisgender woman. Tender and funny, the novel was a critical and commercial success. This follow-up volume is a lopsided collection that the author wrote over the course of 10 years. The opening piece, “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” is set in a hellish future in which a pandemic renders humans incapable of producing sex hormones. It’s also sort of an antiromance centered around two trans women who are inextricably connected, despite what the narrator might wish. In “The Chaser,” a boy who’s reluctant to acknowledge his own sexuality embarks on a secret relationship with his boarding school roommate, the results of which are disastrous for both of them. “The Masker” is a darkly intense interrogation of identity and desire centered on a “sissy” boy who is trying to figure out if they are a cross-dresser or a trans woman while being pulled in different directions by a charismatic fetishist and an overbearing trans elder. Babe, the protagonist of the longest piece, Stag Dance, fells trees for an outlaw logging operation. Remarkably large and prodigiously ugly, he discovers a self he hadn’t recognized before when the camp boss declares that there will be a stag dance—a rustic soiree at which some loggers volunteer to be women. Babe is a terrific character, and his relationship with the prettiest boy in the camp is nuanced and affecting. This could be a crackerjack short story, but it feels interminable at novel length. It’s repetitive, and the old-timey jargon loses its charm pretty quickly. Peters might think about trimming this down to a taut tall tale and venturing deeper into the world she’s created in “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones.”
Even when Peters’ experiments don’t pay off, it’s exciting to read an author willing to take these risks.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593595640
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
