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
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
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