by Karolina Waclawiak ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2020
Contemplative and complex.
A messy meditation on life in the face of death from the author of The Invaders (2015).
Evelyn is waiting for her parents to die—not looking forward to it but preoccupied with this inevitability for which she does not know how to prepare. She’s also waiting for her marriage to die; she’s given up, but she wants her husband, Bobby, to be the one who asks for a divorce. While she waits for both of these endings, she checks out temporarily by taking long drives around Los Angeles, drinking wine, and hitting her weed pen. She’s searching the web for a grief support group when she finds a program that teaches people how to help the terminally ill die. Training for this task compels Evelyn to think deeply about her own life, as does preparing her clients for death. One of the pleasures of this book is that these experiences do not lead to dramatic revelations. The shifts in Evelyn’s thoughts and behavior are subtle and slow. She never makes an explicit connection between her work as a death doula and her decision to finally leave Bobby, but she begins to take practical steps toward that end. Indeed, the process that Evelyn devises to leave her marriage is similar to the process she uses to ease clients toward their final exits. And both processes are morally, ethically, and emotionally fraught. This is not an action-packed novel, and the narrative moves at a meditative pace. What makes it engaging is its narrative voice and its cleareyed assessment of the human condition. Evelyn is self-aware enough to understand her despair and resilient enough to not succumb to it entirely. This does not mean that she has any idea what she should do in order to feel contented and fulfilled—and it’s not that she hasn’t tried. In a passage in which Evelyn is trying to get her doctor to increase her prescription for a sedative, she considers all the therapists she's sought help from. The obstacle between Evelyn and happiness is not a grand tragedy; it is the accumulated weight of the small tragedies we all endure and carry with us.
Contemplative and complex.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-18695-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Share your opinion of this book
More by Karolina Waclawiak
BOOK REVIEW
by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019
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
Share your opinion of this book
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
Share your opinion of this book
More by Donna Tartt
BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt
BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.