Commendably ambitious but only partially successful.
An imaginative, lyrical, and—unfortunately—timely parable about structural injustice from the author of Lakewood (2020).
Josephine Thomas is single, but she regularly hooks up with a man named Preston. She and her best friend, Angie, write comedy together, but Jo’s day job is at the Museum of Cursed Art. She’s about to turn 28, which means that—unless she marries soon—she’ll have to start reporting to the Bureau of Witchcraft for quarterly testing. The world Jo lives in looks very much like our own, right down to the fact that women who choose to have neither husbands nor children are suspect. The difference is that, in this alternate reality, the law assumes that such women are malevolent sorceresses in league with the devil. Jo’s mother taught her both that she was descended from a witch who was burned and that witchcraft isn’t real—that it’s just an excuse to persecute troublesome women. But her mother’s unbelief is not enough to protect Jo—then 14—from accusations of being a witch herself when her mother disappears. And the discovery, years later, that Jo can only claim her inheritance if she collects magical apples from a mysterious island forces her to reexamine everything she thinks she knows about herself. In her first novel, Giddings used tropes from horror and science fiction to explore race and class and generational trauma. Here, she uses fantasy in a similar fashion. And, again, she is particularly interested in what free will means in systems designed to constrain choice. Magic makes women vulnerable. It also empowers them with radical autonomy, and Giddings’ descriptions of magic at work are wonderfully evocative. But the pacing, structure, and worldbuilding leave a lot to be desired. The first half of the narrative moves very slowly, and readers who are here for enchantment are likely to be disappointed. The second half, on the other hand, flies by, leaving many nagging questions unanswered. Also, these two halves seem to take place in different universes. At the start of the story, Jo works, enjoys casual sex, goes out for drinks with friends, gets high, and generally lives a life that will be recognizable to many contemporary women. But the Bureau of Witchcraft as it emerges toward the end only makes sense as part of a government and society defined by fundamentalist Christian views that would make such license impossible, and Giddings does nothing to resolve this conflict.
Commendably ambitious but only partially successful.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-311699-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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
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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