An absorbing and sobering reckoning with all-too-familiar disasters, both personal and planetary.
A Swedish family struggles to cope with climatological disaster.
The von der Esch family—father Didrik, mother Carola, teen daughter Vilja, little brother Zack, and baby Becka—evacuate their summer house in Dalarna as global warming–generated wildfires rage out of control. The author shifts between various family members and characters in their orbit to give first-person accounts of the chaotic aftermath, during which the family is separated (wounded Zack goes off with strangers with a working car; Didrik takes the vulnerable Becka on a crowded train back to Stockholm; Carola and Vilja make their way to an ad hoc refugee camp) and attempts to survive the crisis and hopefully reunite after the worst has passed. The action of the novel is tense, as the oppressive heat, lack of basic resources, and crumbling social contract threaten to overwhelm the embattled clan, but the strongest elements of the narrative are the depth and nuance of the characters’ inner monologues. Didrik, a somewhat pompous PR exec, experiences the catastrophe as a test of his masculinity. Vilja, characterized as selfish and bratty by her father, displays remarkable courage and maturity in navigating the fraught environment of the camp. Didrik’s mistress, Melissa, an ostensibly vacuous social media influencer safely ensconced in a luxury apartment in Stockholm, leads a rich inner life revolving around her pill addiction and borderline sociopathic manipulativeness. André, the teenage son of the tennis legend whose apartment Melissa is housesitting, drowns in insecurities and resentment as he embarks on an ill-advised nautical adventure. A sense of apocalyptic doom throws the relatively petty concerns of the characters into sharp relief even as their humanity is affirmed by the author’s careful attention to their quirks and unique perspectives. There are no villains here aside from climate change—an outward manifestation and inevitable consequence of the self-destructive impulses so relatably embodied by Liljestrand’s cast of haplessly civilized refugees.
An absorbing and sobering reckoning with all-too-familiar disasters, both personal and planetary.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781668005019
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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
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
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