What can’t McCauley do? A writer to watch.
Short fiction featuring Black and Latine characters trying to figure out their roles within their families, their love lives, and their communities.
In the bite-sized title story of McCauley’s collection, the narrator, Andra, moves to South Florida, where her new co-workers want to know where she’s from. “No, I mean…really?” they say. Andra’s father is Black, her mother Puerto Rican. She’s visibly othered, but grief has also estranged her, as she’s recently lost her mother. When Andra runs into a dark-skinned Latina at a panadería who speaks Spanish to her, she freezes, thinking of her mother, “Body-full with misted ancestors, yearning for old ghosts.” McCauley, who is also Afro-Latina, chronicles such yearnings in each story, interested in those spaces where differing forces collide internally and externally. Sometimes those forces are based in identity, as in the stunning opening story, “Torsion,” in which the narrator, Claudia (another young Afro-Latina) weighs loyalty to her mother against her desire to move into a self-determined future after her mother asks her to help illegally seize her young disabled brother from the foster parent he’s living with. Almost always, those forces have a moral dimension, as well, as in “Good Guys,” in which Alejandro, a college student at Miami Dade College, seeks to convince the audience, and himself, that he’s better than the class villain, Vick, who comes on to a young woman with a very good reason for not being interested in dating. The stories hang together in surprising ways, often linked across time—McCauley excels at historical fiction as well as contemporary. Individually, they are each admiringly gutsy and tender, with flashes of poetry. No reader will be surprised to learn that McCauley’s debut—Scar On / Scar Off (2017)—blended prose and poems.
What can’t McCauley do? A writer to watch.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781640095687
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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
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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