Striking and original.
A debut collection depicting women who live on the margins of Ukrainian society.
“I’ve never felt a sense of security in Ukraine,” explains the narrator of one story. “It wasn’t safe for a girl or woman there.” Indeed, a sense of unease pervades every corner of this book, which spotlights women affected directly and indirectly by the violence in Eastern Ukraine. (The contours of the conflict are anything but straightforward: “Russia is waging war against Ukraine; Ukraine is waging war against an internal enemy…people say that Europe is also waging some kind of war here.”) In a series of narrative portraits, readers are introduced to a witch who delivers a town’s babies using an enormous mitt, years later wordlessly compelling them to do her bidding (“The Woman Who Caught Babies Into a Mitt”); to a woman who lives in a damp room, “bursting with health, so much so that she no longer felt human,” and prays desperately for illness (“The Woman Who Fell Sick”); and, in the acerbically ironic “The Woman Who Could Not Walk,” to a protagonist whose “perfidious feet” betray her and stop moving amid a crowded street on International Women’s Day. Some stories adopt an overtly symbolic register, like the darkly humorous “The Stars,” in which a weekly horoscope informs townspeople when it’s safe to venture outside and when they should “seek seclusion and privacy” from the shellings above. Some are masterfully imbued with a sense of loss—such as “The Florist," in which a woman as beautiful as her flowers disappears without explanation, presumably “into the fields and joined the partisans.” Though the stories’ brevity occasionally dissatisfies, it also renders each one precious—like a gut punch, full of simple observations that quickly become devastating. Belorusets, who came to fiction from photojournalism (her own images appear in the book), excels at building stories that serve as striking snapshots of lives—strange, beautiful, and absent the interpretative context that might render them neater and less unsettling. As it is, this singular collection brings Ukraine, “the land of residual phenomena,” entirely to life.
Striking and original.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2984-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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