A celebration of Black family life that will make you laugh and cry in equal measure.
A set of linked stories map the lives of a Black family in Louisville, Kentucky, tracing the generational effects of addiction, poverty, and mental illness.
At the heart of the book is the often fraught relationship between mothers and daughters—always complicated but made especially so by the unpredictable and deceitful behaviors typical of those suffering from addiction. Gentry maps the ways an unstable mother can unmoor her daughter, and how a girl’s innocence is dissolved by the imperative to survive and protect her vulnerable mother: “You are starting to realize that you have no solution for your mother’s depression. There is nothing you can say. Nothing you can do. You will never save her.” In “A Satisfying Meal,” the sharp contrast between two families at Thanksgiving provides an insight into not only the wealth disparity of the Black community, but also into various political divides. At the Thompson family’s dinner, everyone is seated and served formally at the table; JayLynn—who's attending for the first time as Nigel Thompson’s girlfriend—is subtly interrogated about her intellectual pursuits at college; and the use of the N-word represents an egregious blasphemy. Meanwhile, at JayLynn’s aunt’s house, where she and Nigel go afterward, family members eat without ceremony, use the N-word freely, and joke around. The absence of JayLynn’s mother and the eventual departure of her aunts to buy drugs draws attention to the relentless mundanity of addiction and depression—and the ways these illnesses impact families. In “A Good Education,” two young men who grew up together reunite, but now one sells the drugs the other's mother is addicted to, seemingly without making the connection: “Your moms is like my moms...I mean...you think she’s using?” In “A New World,” JayLynn’s 16-year-old cousin, Zaria, goes into labor with the baby she'd hoped would deter her mother, Dee, from feeding her addiction, only to have Dee leave the hospital before the baby arrives, going in search of the next high. Gentry steadfastly refuses to reduce her characters to their misery, imbuing them instead with wit, loyalty, and humor.
A celebration of Black family life that will make you laugh and cry in equal measure.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781952271984
Page Count: 288
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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