An absorbing coming-of-age tale with bits of travelogue as a bonus.
In Merriman’s novel, a young American woman aims to change her life during a year abroad in 1973 and ’74.
Shortly after her frail, elderly father dies,Lissa Power, an aspiring writer, goes off to Clermont-Ferrand in south-central France, where, with side trips, she’ll spend her junior year of college. It’s a whole new world for a girl who’s lived a sheltered life in rural Maryland. One of her first orders of business is to lose her virginity, which she does with a Lebanese medical student named Georges, who turns out to be a bit of a cad and a sponge, although Lissa remains smitten with him for months. She also makes friends with fellow students from the British Isles and elsewhere, including the Middle East. She spends a lot of time with one of her dearest and saddest friends, but she doesn’t realize he’s gay until late in their acquaintance. There are happier episodes, too, as when she goes on a skiing jaunt that turns into pure slapstick. At another point, she comes upon a Romani camp while on holiday and is stirred by exposure to their culture. Other trips follow, culminating in a long Eurail jaunt at the end of the term. These are all portrayed as experiences that she’ll never forget, and she does come back home wiser, humbler, and more mature. Merriman is a writer of long experience, and it shows from the way she invests her account with almost mystical passages (“At this moment, the whole world as I have known it is swallowed by the moon”); at another point, she describes the delighted father of one of Lissa’s friends: “A huge upturned crevice emerges on the rugged Scotsman’s face, like a rock smiling.” When Lissa’s protective big brother, Spence, arrives in Paris, the author relates Lissa’s surprise at realizing that, in this larger world, their dynamic is different than it is back home. And, indeed, the larger world provides a historical backdrop like a newsreel (as with references to Watergate) that keep readers anchored.
An absorbing coming-of-age tale with bits of travelogue as a bonus.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8987070758
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Green Place Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2023
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
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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