A funny and thought-provoking supernatural tale with a memorable protagonist.
In this novel, a woman who speaks to angels finds herself trapped in a corporate cult.
Massage therapist Marigold Sunshine Whitaker can talk to angels. All mortals have angels, she claims—looking after them, keeping them out of trouble—but most people don’t realize it. “Let’s be real clear, though: Angels are not like these cute little baby butts flying around,” Marigold explains. “They are fierce. Like, they do not play around. And you do not want to make fun of an Angel or piss it off. Trust me.” Marigold blames her angels for landing her in prison, her punishment for assaulting a prominent local real estate agent after he tried to force her to give him a massage of a different sort. (Marigold claims the angels possessed her during the assault and then again when she threatened the judge during her trial.) When a lucky break gets her out of jail early, Marigold takes a job at the Denver Airport, hoping to save enough money to move to Ibiza. By an immense stroke of luck—or some targeted manifesting—Marigold meets and impresses Krish McKinley, the founder and CEO of the lifestyle brand Wolf&Bees. Krish invites Marigold to become his personal assistant, and it seems like a dream come true—at first. But it soon becomes clear that Krish’s company is more than a little cultlike, and even Marigold’s angels might not be influential enough to get her out of it. Clarke’s prose is sharp and funny, as here where Marigold admits the blind spots of her angelic protectors: “Angels don’t always understand everything down here on Earth. As powerful as Uriel is, he simply does not grasp the nuance of workplace dynamics or paying bills or even why you would want to heat up your Lean Cuisine in a microwave.” Marigold is a wonderfully realized creation, managing to remain sympathetic even at her most shocking and irrational moments. The book succeeds in satirizing various woo-woo aspects of modern society while inviting readers to seriously consider how and why they construct their personal belief systems.
A funny and thought-provoking supernatural tale with a memorable protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-08-802133-0
Page Count: 469
Publisher: Middle Finger Press
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.
Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.
Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0141180633
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
PERSPECTIVES
Gorgeous and alive.
A fable of being and belonging from the author of The Map of Salt and Stars (2018).
This is the story of two artists who are connected by secret histories. This is also the story of a trans man struggling to come out to the people closest to him and a woman who found new love even though her way of desiring seemed impossible in the time and place in which she was born. This is a story about immigrants. This is a ghost story, and the specters that haunt its pages are literal and figurative. And this is a story about birds. What binds all these disparate strands together are Joukhadar’s deep sympathy for his characters and his powerfully poetic voice. One-half of the novel is set in contemporary New York. The narrator is unnamed because the name he was given at birth no longer fits him. As he tries to express his true gender, he addresses his dead mother as if her absence makes his transition impossible. “There is so much of you—and, therefore, of myself—that I will never know,” he writes. Laila Z’s tale begins in 1920, in French-occupied Syria. After her family immigrates to America, she becomes an acclaimed illustrator of birds. The unnamed narrator knows her work because she was his ornithologist mother’s favorite artist, and, when he stumbles upon Laila’s diary, he finds the key to unlocking himself. Joukhadar is writing for a general American audience about people who are often categorized as “other.” Both narrators are Syrian American, as are most of the significant characters. Many of these characters are also queer. The author creates a world for his characters in which readers who are perhaps unfamiliar with the communities being represented can find their way around, but he does not feel compelled to translate and explain. And Joukhadar’s prose style—folkloric, lyrical, and emotionally intense—creates its own atmosphere.
Gorgeous and alive.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2149-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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