Raucously entertaining yarns whose wry wit carries a subtle moral resonance.
Uneasy Jewish people wrestle with their sins in these tragicomic stories.
Margolis’ tales mostly explore life in Russian shtetls and the tarnished “Promised Land” of America as well as souls journeying from life to afterlife, with improbable swerves along the way. In “Moshko’s Lovers,” a rabbi’s daughter rejects a village cobbler because he had a vision of eating nonkosher food during a previous incarnation as a courtier to Henry VIII; in “The Dybbuk of Brooklyn,” a New York City liquor salesman pays a rabbi to exorcise a wandering spirit who has taken up residence in him and shouts obnoxious comments; and in “Lilith’s Daughter,” a St. Louis man obtains a female golem who changes from docile servant to an independent woman with feminist beliefs. The soul of a poor man waits centuries to enter heaven only to discover the price of celestial efficiency in “God’s Sabbatical”; an angel tells a rabbi to promote a local shepherd as the Messiah, which makes his congregation giddy with delight until the Chosen One makes unpleasant demands in “Two Goats and a Dog”; and in another story, a dinosaur in the Garden of Eden eats the forbidden fruit along with Adam and Eve and watches the punishment unfold. Margolis’ fiction mixes magical realism with a rich vein of Jewish humor, featuring shady rabbis, plenty of kvetching (“He just sits there, staring at his plate as if he might find a wife there, and suddenly I’m supposed to marry him?”), and a prosaic approach to ethics that extends into divine bureaucracy (“Well, you stole that bag of candy from Kaminski when you were a kid, and then there were the seventeen apples and eight pears that you pilfered from Goldstein’s fruit stand….But that’s not enough to get you into Hell”). But underneath, there’s a tenderness that makes the author’s funny, ironic view of ordinary life feel luminous, as well, as when a man who lost his wife to cholera calls her “the greatest of angels…who would listen to all that a talkative Jewish man had to say even when he becomes boring.”
Raucously entertaining yarns whose wry wit carries a subtle moral resonance.Pub Date: July 15, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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