A fresh collection marred by its author's insistence on provocation.
A collection of inventive stories about queer life that is often too edgy for its own good.
Peck (Night Soil, 2018, etc.) returns with his first story collection, with tales that circle around questions of belonging, entrapment, violence, and the frustrated desire for intimacy. Most often Peck trains his attention on relationships between queer men, most of which are laced with melancholy if not outright misanthropy. In "The Law of Diminishing Returns," an American writer who's decamped to London struggles to attain intimacy when all he seems to attract are men who don't want to be in relationships with him. "I was one of those things that can be used only once," he worries. "People like Derek, I thought...they were able to have boyfriends and still find the time for trysts...whereas it was all I could manage to be someone's someone else." In the hilarious "Sky Writing," a man boards a flight and tells a college student sitting next to him the story of his doomed relationship with a wealthy capitalist, whose love requires him to travel around the world interminably; meanwhile, he pursues potential romance with a flight attendant. "Bliss" finds a young man sheltering the thug who murdered his mother, for reasons that no one—not even the man himself—can make sense of. Stories like these find Peck in fine, counterintuitive form, spinning fiction from the most unlikely and captivating premises, writing in a mode that rides the line between horror and erotica. When he allows himself to step out of his self-fashioned quirkiness the stories attain a level of emotional honesty that stuns. However, Peck too often falls prey to his own impulses toward provocation, resulting in stories that nauseate without much intellectual payoff. In "Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore," a 5-year-old fixates on a teen boy in terms that are explicitly sexualized. Peck handles the subject more for laughs than thought, and the result is a story that plays into dangerous stereotypes about gay men. The collection's final two stories, "Summer Beam" parts one and two, end in a disgusting incident of misogynist violence that haunts, but only because it feels willfully mean-spirited and poorly plotted.
A fresh collection marred by its author's insistence on provocation.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64129-082-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.
A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.
Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ (Wilder, 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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