A punishing read in terms of both content and style.
The author of the story collection Don’t Erase Me (1997) explores the lives of girls who have been kidnapped and tortured in her debut novel.
Fern’s mother works nights at the hospital, where she steals pills. Gwin loves the musician Prince, which is a source of conflict between her and her deeply religious mother. Fern barely remembers her father. Gwin never knew hers, but she did have Mr. P. until he decided to leave her mother. Fern and Gwin find each other when they are both being held captive by a man who keeps them in chains, beats them, and rapes them for years. Later, a third girl will join them. Before she was abducted, Jesenia had an abusive boyfriend; after she was abducted, she had her captor’s baby. The first part of this novel shifts between the girls’ early lives and their experiences as prisoners in Queens, New York. There are also glimpses of what happens when they are free again. Ferrell’s blend of stream-of-consciousness with dark fairy-tale elements is inventive but only fitfully effective, and sections narrated by other voices—including the journalist whose advice column, for reasons that are not at all clear, gives this book its title—are more confusing than illuminating. The second half of this novel is less repetitive than the first, but it also makes less sense. There is, for example, a very long chapter that seems to be Jesenia’s daughter’s answers to questions she’s being asked before she can be released from the hospital after a suicide attempt. There are footnotes. It’s not difficult to envision this chapter as a powerful short story, but it’s a challenge to read after having endured the first half. Ferrell is asking a lot of her audience. What she gives is sometimes too much, sometimes too little.
A punishing read in terms of both content and style.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-79361-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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