Stark, intimate, and melancholy.
Three women negotiate death, birth, and loss in a violent landscape.
Sainz Borgo’s second novel is set in a country where (as the title suggests) a cemetery is contested land. The so-called Third Country is administered by a sharp-edged, dark-humored woman named Visitación Salazar, who handles the numerous deaths caused by a plague and a brutal cartel. Angustias, who is directed to Visitación when her twin infant sons die from the plague, is soon drawn into her long-running feud with Abundio, the regional cartel leader, who resents Visitación’s fiefdom and her knack for avoiding his thugs. Angustias, whose husband left her after the twins’ deaths and has few money-making options, finds a safe haven in the cemetery, where she cares for both the corpses and others seeking sanctuary, like Jairo, a musician who writes folk tunes about the region, and Consuelo, a barmaid who’s pregnant and escaping her abusive partner. Sainz Borgo (who was born in Venezuela and now lives in Spain) alternates between third-person narration and Angustias’ point of view, but in either case the mood is mordant and threatening (“Angustias” is Spanish for “anguish”), defined by clipped, terse sentences. That approach highlights the brutality of the environment, though it sacrifices precision—the roots of Visitación’s role as a cemetery caretaker aren’t clear, and the occasional magical-realist touches (Visitación has a constant “plague halo” of wasps above her head) are too passing to register deeply. Subplots involving Abundio’s power struggles with a local mayor and sicarios are similarly broad-brush. But it succeeds as a study of grief and the urge to create spaces fit to contemplate loss. “I was only interested in keeping alive my memories of the babies I loved,” Angustias thinks, and Sainz Borgo suggests that the rituals of burial are essential to valuing life.
Stark, intimate, and melancholy.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780063213876
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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