A truly unique voice.
A chance reunion with a childhood friend sends a young woman reeling through the surreal taxonomy of her life.
Seven is 24 years old, works in the laundry room of a chiropractor’s office, and still lives at home with her mother and grandmother. Her days consist of a monotony measured in repeated sensation: the “pigskin” texture of the thin towels, the “symphonic” sound of the chiropractor’s urine stream in the laundry room toilet, the jellylike residue of the soap dispenser that “dribbl[es] like a nosebleed” and must be wiped clean every hour. At home, Seven follows similarly long-established rituals, watching television with her mother and her grandmother in the “apartment [they have] been renting since before [she] was born.” Though her mother encourages her to move out on her own someday, there seems to be nothing that could shake Seven from this cycle—which serves to forestall the vision of a girl’s future her grandmother once presented to her: “You’re born. You leave your family before it can eat you. You are eaten by another family and give birth to its children. You make your life a service to others, and in exchange you are never alone with your desires.” Then, while cleaning one of the chiropractor’s treatment rooms, Seven comes face-to-face with Cecilia, a beloved childhood friend and subject of Seven’s most closely guarded fantasies. Cecilia’s reemergence in Seven’s life instigates a flurry of uncontrolled memory wherein the girls’ shared experiments with forbidden sensuality express themselves in Seven’s desire to consume Cecilia’s very being, to enshroud her beloved in the cavities of her body, to become her—if not in this life, then perhaps in the next. An erotic, dissociative exploration of obsession, this slender novella reconfigures desire as a corporeal function as integral as breathing or digestion. While the visceral, disorienting nature of the language sometimes obscures the images themselves, the work of reading this book leaves the reader with the same feeling one has after eating a particularly indulgent meal—satiation, with the knowledge of more hunger to come.
A truly unique voice.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781566897075
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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