Whip-smart and ambitious, but tangled in its own web of themes and scenarios.
A father and daughter share an epic bond over anxiety and addiction.
Hallberg’s 2015 breakthrough, City on Fire, exemplified Tom Wolfe’s concept of the billion-footed beast, a social novel that strived to capture the world in its fullness. This disappointing follow-up is similarly bulky and rangy (and very New York) but narrows its focus to two lead characters. In 2011, when most of the novel is set, Ethan Aspern is a recovering addict who’s determined to bond with his hyperintelligent 13-year-old daughter, Jolie. But she has her own set of emotional issues, including some ill-advised drinking that leads to a near-miss with a subway train when she hops on the tracks to recover her phone. The novel shifts back and forth in time, chronicling Ethan’s unlikely romance with Sarah Kupferberg, Jolie’s mother (he’s listless, she’s an aspiring academic); his fraught relationship with his father, head of a foundering private school; Jolie’s budding, sketchy friendship with a young man equally interested in Occupy Wall Street and LSD; and Sarah’s parents, judgmental of everybody involved. The core of the novel occurs during a (metaphorically fraught) Thanksgiving weekend, as Ethan attempts to bond with a Jolie who’s determined to give everyone the silent treatment; what ensues includes (among other things) accusations of kidnapping, a bad LSD trip, and anaphylactic shock. Hallberg enlivens this setup by playing with form, modeling sections after an old-school mixtape and shuffling perspectives, but his efforts to show how the parent-child bond both persists and disrupts feels stodgy. Fans of Jonathan Franzen will appreciate Hallberg’s hyperprecise, socially acute observational skill; readers of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels will note a similarly desperate, self-deprecating dad in Ethan. But the resulting novel is too overworked to feel as lively and funny as either of those authors.
Whip-smart and ambitious, but tangled in its own web of themes and scenarios.Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536926
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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