At once absurd and profound.
Inhabitants of a New York City tenement band together to brave the “after-after.”
Earthquakes rock Manhattan, reducing the financial district to rubble. Then weekly acid rainstorms start corroding buildings, bridges, roads, and power lines. Cell towers go down, checkpoints go up, and travel between boroughs becomes difficult. Mira tries to convince her partner, Mal, to flee Queens—now an “At Risk” zone—and go stay with Mira’s mother, Ma, on the Lower East Side, but their crumbling abode was orphan Mal’s childhood home, and she can’t bring herself to leave. Heartbroken but unwilling to die for Mal’s nostalgia, Mira returns to her own childhood home: building 4B, apartment 9A of the Gratuitous Place housing projects. Mira feels lost without Mal, though, and begins hosting a ham radio show, How To Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster, in hopes that Mal will hear. Instead, Mira’s transmissions attract the romantic attentions of Sad—the headless man who lives in unit 1A. Excerpts from Mira’s broadcast pepper Leung’s ambitious debut, which unfolds via myriad perspectives and narrative fashions. From Ma to gleeful poltergeist Grandpa Why to the spirit of an oversized queer cockroach named Shin, each boldly drawn point-of-view character adds a new layer to the story and texture to the world in which it’s set. Style occasionally overshadows substance, fuzzing the tale’s focus, and readers seeking catharsis may be left wanting, but by and large, Leung’s novel strikes a satisfying chord, harmonizing joy and optimism with despair and melancholia. Surreal imagery combines with poetic prose to illustrate what life and love look like when crisis becomes commonplace and everyone is grieving—even the ghosts.
At once absurd and profound.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781324076186
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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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