Immensely satisfying as both a mystery and an unblinkered look at working motherhood.
Set in 1951 around Puget Sound, this debut novel centers on a woman and a girl who, independently of each other and in vastly different circumstances, are abandoned.
While enjoying their lunch break outdoors on Elita Island, home to a federal penitentiary, two prison guards encounter a feral child who appears to be around 12, but is actually 17. Because the girl, who’s being called Atalanta Doe, doesn’t speak, the social worker assigned to the case is elated when she hears about Professor Bernadette Baston: “A woman child development specialist! How interesting, I thought,” she tells Bernadette when they meet. Bernadette, a curiosity as a woman in the psychology department at Seattle’s state university, specializes in language acquisition, but explains that she’s a scholar and can’t be expected to teach Atalanta to talk. Nevertheless, over the course of her visits with the girl, Bernadette becomes determined to learn how Atalanta got to the island, which will mean asking the area’s residents unwelcome questions. As it happens, Bernadette, too, knows something about surviving on one’s own: Her husband left four years earlier, when their daughter was an infant. Lunstrum builds her fathomlessly rich plot with sentences that suggest she has, as Bernadette describes a novelist’s job, “taken a polishing cloth to the surface of every word.” (Readers should be patient with early chapters that minutely recount what Bernadette acknowledges is “the teeming wildness” of her thoughts.) The novel succeeds as both a mystery and a pitiless look at the burdens that have historically been particular to female parents and professionals. As Bernadette observes a Tacoma detective’s lack of affect, she accepts that his “flat, stone-faced approach is a privilege she’ll never have.”
Immensely satisfying as both a mystery and an unblinkered look at working motherhood.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780810147867
Page Count: 272
Publisher: TriQuarterly/Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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