A rollicking satire of contemporary motherhood with a speculative twist.
In Imas’ debut novel, a mother of three discovers her animalistic side.
In Straussville, Oregon, motherhood is turning Harriet “Harry” Lime into a monster—literally. She lives with her husband, Theo, with whom she rarely gets to speak or have sex, a 14-year-old daughter who is turning into a woman faster than Harry can handle, and a pair of 3-year-old twins whose potty training ensures the house always smells faintly of urine. In addition to her familial obligations, she has a “pay the bills” job (rather than a career) in marketing, a walking club, and a book club. Plus, there are regular PTA meetings, which have lately been dominated by discussions concerning an expensive statue dedicated to the mothers of Straussville (and designed in secret by PTA president Patrick Terrence, a grandfather whom Harry has hated since he taught her in high school). When Harry gets an early peek at the underwhelming sculpture—which Terrence has drained money from after-school programs to fund—Harry goes into literal beast mode. She transforms into a massive, apelike animal, uproots the offending statue, and drags it into the Straussville Reservoir. Harry wakes up in the reservoir with no memory of what’s happened, though she can’t shake the feeling she’s responsible for the damage. “[A] single idea came forward and stood apart from it all,” she thinks. “Maybe I hadn’t laid waste to the schoolyard, the old fountain, and the statue. Maybe some giant…creature had done it. And maybe that giant creature had come out of me.” Plenty of neighbors witness the horror, but luckily no one can tie the creature back to her—at least not yet. There are strange uniformed men in town, however, who may be on her trail. What’s more, Harry may not be the only one who is turning into something monstrous.
The novel is driven by Harry’s garrulous narration, which vividly fleshes out her world with descriptions, observations, jokes, and even footnotes. She’s a thoroughly believable suburban mom who balances her sincerity and progressive values with her sometimes-cringey mom humor. Here she praises another mom in the PTA: “She had an autoimmune disorder, I knew, and had gone back to work just weeks after adopting baby Ella. It was the kind of feat that Hercules himself would’ve taken one look at and said, ‘Nah, I’m good.’ ” Here she regrets not helping out another mom who was treated poorly by Terrence: “This didn’t just feel like a Mom-Fail but a Woman-Fail, and in my mind at least, a Friend-Fail too.” That Harry is sometimes hard to take does not make her any less of an achievement. Imas pairs a brilliant premise with a highly memorable narrator, and together they should find a wide readership. The characters are finely drawn, and the speculative aspects of the book are handled quite masterfully. The book takes on not only the hypocrisies of the impossible standards to which mothers are held in America, but also the discourse surrounding those hypocrisies.
A rollicking satire of contemporary motherhood with a speculative twist.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9798988246404
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mudlark
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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