What starts out a smoothly entertaining social satire turns out to expect a little work from you, dear reader.
As failure and shame threaten to demolish her world, a Black woman throws a dinner party...and thinks wistfully about her past.
Known as "The Wolf" by her sister lesbians at Bryn Mawr 20 years ago, Liselle is now married to a White man, a lawyer-turned-politician named Winn Anderson. Winn has just lost an election for the state legislature, and Liselle has planned a dinner party as a last hurrah for their biggest supporters. Her doubts about the evening are compounded by the fear that her husband will be hauled away by the FBI before dessert; though he doesn't know it yet, she's been told he may soon be indicted for corruption. Set in the author's hometown of Philadelphia, this novel—part social satire, part character study—takes its title from a trickster in Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). Liselle read Lorde her senior year of college, during her brief affair with a woman named Selena Octave. Though they haven't seen each other in years, the pile-up of disappointments in Liselle's life inspires her to call and leave a one-word message for her old friend. Solomon excels at ironic description—one character has "the look of someone who had aged out of playing the rich jerk in an eighties teen movie"—and builds further ironies into her depiction of race and class. While Liselle is often called Lisa, Lisette, Liesl, etc., she herself is afraid to say aloud the name of the woman helping her in the kitchen, Xochitl. In contemplating the conversational possibilities of the gathering, she thinks, “There was so much lying all the time, particularly when you got together with people who were not Black. Bland observations about schools, neighborhoods, and the words 'kids' and 'safe' and 'family' tried to cover up a landscape of volcanos oozing with blood, pus, and shit.” The last page of the book will leave you stunned. Solomon's decision about where to end her dinner party puts her in a lineage of modernist party hosts like Woolf and Proust.
What starts out a smoothly entertaining social satire turns out to expect a little work from you, dear reader.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-14005-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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