Vivid, thoughtful, emotionally layered fiction.
In this story collection—her first book to be translated into English—Latvian writer Egle delves into the feelings and experiences of women at different ages.
A mischievous young girl longs for a beautiful doll, unaware of what the adults around her are getting up to. A wife suffers a tragic loss. An office worker dates a man who turns into a stalker. A librarian gives in to a secret desire. A sister is haunted by the memory of a younger brother who disappeared. Animals feature in several stories: a pet cat, a fox in the snow. A heart transplant recipient tells his wife that the surgeon cooked his original heart, then fed it to his dachshund. The focus throughout this collection is on women: their inner lives, their desires, their complex thoughts and often contradictory feelings. There are men here as well, but they’re ancillary, never the main characters. A woman repulsed by her alcoholic stepfather tries to understand how her mother ended up with him: “What about him did she come to like, why did she want to marry this man, have children, live together with him day to day, year to year, eat at the same table, sleep in the same bed?” With a perceptive eye and a nuanced understanding, Egle shows the complicated bonds that connect families, friends, and romantic partners, their dependencies, frustrations, tenderness, and incongruities. Her characters contend with heartbreak, loss, and cognitive decline. “It’s a woman’s fate to love and suffer,” a woman thinks on a three-day hiking trip with an old flame who wants to marry her, but “she has strongly resolved to cheat fate.” The prose is unhurried, the language at times refreshingly earthy, and in any situation there’s more than first meets the eye. Of a field of beautiful flowers, the same woman observes, “In the sweltering heat they exude the aroma of a piss-filled jar of honey.”
Vivid, thoughtful, emotionally layered fiction.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781960385154
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
