An eclectic if uneven collection of short stories.
Ranging from Nepal to Tijuana to Rome and beyond, Newman’s second collection explores how people from disparate countries, cultures, and circumstances come together.
The title story is about a girl who grows up in an orphanage in New Orleans that isn’t quite what it seems, and while it isn’t the book's strongest, it does demonstrate many of the author’s strengths. Newman excels at succinctly providing her characters with rich histories and pacing the surprising, well-executed turns in some of the stories. She can be inventive with form and creative with plotting. The story “Swisher Sweets,” for example, plays with chronology and point of view to show how complicated grief is as a woman mourns the death of her ex-husband while managing his affairs on behalf of their grown children and her former mother-in-law. There are also moments of tenderness and insight. In “The House of Naan and Saffron,” the first-person narrator, reflecting on his Norwegian family’s time in India as missionaries, says of his parents, “If my father was a stingy moralist and my mother an occasional drunk, they covered for each other, and under that cover I was safe.” Later he says, “It is easier to play the rebel of your own life than to actually lead it.” Other stories show off a dark sense of humor. But there are moments when the writing feels heartless rather than funny or clever. “Sweet Nothings,” a story about a friendship between two men living in Tijuana, is clumsy in its use of Spanish and stereotypical imagery like mariachis and jumping beans. It includes a callous quip about “an alien (outer space, not illegal).” In "The Little Ice Girl," also set in Tijuana, Newman writes, “On this day Ana wore the dress her grandmother hand-stitched out of flour sacks; she looked like a faded, walking billboard for tortillas. A triangle of calico pulled her black hair back from her churro-brown face.” These insensitivities distract from otherwise skillful storytelling.
An eclectic if uneven collection of short stories.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-883285-96-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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