Granular yet transcendent storytelling.
Eleven searingly alive stories about Black men and women from West Texas explore the ways remorse and resentment can coexist in secrecy.
The opening story, “The Mother,” carries an emotional wallop while setting up the collection’s theme through the voice of a self-proclaimed “old junkie whore” forced to face troubling memories about her role in shaping her long-abandoned son, a cult leader who claimed to be the Messiah and led his mostly white followers to commit mass suicide. The title story, another tour de force, also concerns a single mother, who must decide how far she’ll go to protect her “good kid” after he’s accused of a violent act not unlike one she suffered but keeps secret. Children, in person or memory, haunt these pages, beloved even when sources of grief. For mothers, of course, but in a refreshing turn, Watkins also pays serious attention to the importance of paternal love. After the death of his infant son in “Dog Person,” a father’s problematic attachment to his Great Dane—animals play symbolic roles throughout—obscures the secret betrayals destroying his once-perfect marriage. In “Tipping,” a woman almost overlooks her dead husband’s cheating and lying because he was a loving stepfather. Watkins’ protagonists want to rise above traumatic childhoods but fear, often correctly, that they are failing as parents and spouses. The politics of race are a given in these stories, and equally important are the socioeconomic differences—money, social status, education—that cause divisions difficult to surmount. “Cutting Horse” is an aria about the doomed attempts of a “part gangster, part cowboy” to reinvent himself for his genteel accountant wife. Watkins powerfully depicts unsustainable relationships, but she offers solace in the tough-minded love story “Moving the Animal,” about a woman caring for her husband after his stroke. In the final story, “Time After,” a sister’s search for the brother she rejected out of religious rigidity reveals love’s redemptive possibilities.
Granular yet transcendent storytelling.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9780593185940
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Tiny Reparations
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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