A fun and lighthearted novel about a luxurious boarding school heading for disaster.
The headmaster of a heavily indebted Jewish boarding school tries to save it from financial collapse in Troy and Parry’s novel.
Jeff Taylor puts out fires (both academic and financial) as headmaster of the Hampton Acres Hebrew Academy, or HAHA for short. He has written his resignation letter but hasn’t yet given it to Samantha Kleinman, the founder’s daughter and CEO. The school was built with unnecessary luxury, and it costs over $1 million a month to stay afloat; Taylor needs $50 million to pay debts and $20 million to keep the school open for two more years. The challenges are vast: HAHA is located in rural Georgia next to a hog farm, and the school is receiving bomb threats worded as song lyrics. The calls are hoaxes, and the students have dubbed the perpetrator “the hip-hop bomber.” But parents are worried, and Samantha (called Sammy) travels the world looking for potential students (“I’m doing it with smoke and mirrors,” she tells Jeff). With Sammy off in Kazakhstan, the school receives another bomb threat, but Jeff gets good news: Air Force One is being kept at an airport nearby, which means HAHA and the hog farm are under Secret Service protection. The school doesn’t have enough cash to make it to the end of the year, though, and Jeff needs some way to raise $3 million to last until graduation day. Troy and Parry’s lighthearted comic take on a boarding school gone wrong features zany characters with ridiculous human foibles, making the novel an enjoyable read. Inside the closed world of the school, which is global in scope but concerned only with itself, the authors deftly detail what the kids find hilarious and how the adults drive each other insane. Jeff has many variables to manage, and the way he moves from crisis to crisis is entertaining. Some of the supporting characters are underdeveloped, including Jeff’s girlfriend, Barbara, but the novel largely succeeds in balancing its large cast of characters.
A fun and lighthearted novel about a luxurious boarding school heading for disaster.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9798988235804
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Lion Of Judah Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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