A brutally effective look at intergenerational trauma.
A dark “biomythography”—to use a word coined by Audre Lorde, as Foote does—about the Great Migration.
Around 1916, the families of Lucy Grimes and Celia Coleman decide they’ve had enough of the South. Sick of living on and farming land that belongs to white people, they opt to move north, lured by letters from friends and neighbors who have relocated: “Us women could stay at home all day, baking blackberry pie for our husbands and children. We could have hands like the lily-white ladies in the Sears Roebuck catalog—real soft and smooth, cuz we’d cream em every night. The only cotton we’d touch would be our dresses and gloves and the babies’ diapers.” Lucy and Celia meet on a train to New Jersey, where they hope for better things. The two are unlikely friends: Lucy is gentle and retiring; Celia is “coarse” and “abrasive.” Both become widowed and are forced to raise their children alone; Celia turns to the bottle for comfort. Their relationship is destroyed after Celia catches her son, Jebbie, playing doctor with Lucy’s daughter Bertha. Jebbie and Bertha grow up to have children together, but Bertha loses a pregnancy after Celia shoves her down the stairs. The rest of Foote’s debut novel—inspired by her own family—traces the intergenerational trauma of the entwined families over the ensuing decades. There’s a great deal of focus on Celia, who is revealed to be so mean and drunk that some of her own grandchildren plot to murder her. Though this is a brutal novel, devoid of anything approaching light, Foote’s prose is excellent and her dialogue rings true. She paints a vivid picture of the community of Vauxhall, New Jersey, and sticks the landing at the end of the book. The structure is a bit scattered, and one wishes the stories that make up the novel cohered a little more, but that’s mostly nitpicking—this is a promising debut from a clearly gifted writer.
A brutally effective look at intergenerational trauma.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781638931140
Page Count: 320
Publisher: SJP Lit/Zando
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
