AFTER THE DAM

Name: AFTER THE DAM
Author: Amy Hassinger
ISBN: 978-1-597-09753-6

by Amy Hassinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 2016

Taut, beautifully written, and suspenseful, this resonant, feminist drama eschews easy answers. A page-turner of the highest...

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When one person’s political passion conflicts with the rest of her family's desires, tensions are inevitable.

Rachel Clayborne, Michael German, and their infant daughter, Deirdre, have been living in Illinois, close to the college where Michael teaches. Rachel has been halfheartedly working on a Ph.D. in environmental science, but, since giving birth, her energy has flagged and she’s begun questioning her commitment to the field. She’s also depressed and angry—doubting that she’s well-suited for the domesticity she’s somehow fallen into. She’s stewing, so when her dad phones and informs her that her grandmother, called Grand, is dying, she and Deirdre sneak off in the middle of the night and drive to the Farm, the Wisconsin home that's been in the Clayborne family for generations. Rachel doesn’t leave a note about their destination—she and the child just vanish while Michael sleeps. Once in Wisconsin, she and Grand easily reconnect, and despite Grand’s frailty and memory lapses, the pair are buoyed by one another. Still, tensions arise. The main issue involves Grand’s plan to leave the Farm to Diane Bishop, her Native American nurse and longtime friend, in essence returning the land to the Ojibwe people who once owned it. After all, Diane argues, the Claybornes acquired the property fraudulently and restoring it is simply making things right. Grand agrees, changes her will, and sets off a battle royal within the Clayborne family. Along the way, Rachel connects with her first love, Joe Bishop, Diane’s son and the caretaker of an area dam, and grapples with issues including marital fidelity, family ties, indigenous rights, and lifestyle preferences.

Taut, beautifully written, and suspenseful, this resonant, feminist drama eschews easy answers. A page-turner of the highest caliber.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-597-09753-6

Page Count: 344

Publisher: Red Hen Press

Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.