WHEN WE WERE SOMEONE ELSE

Name: WHEN WE WERE SOMEONE ELSE
Author: Rachel Groves
ISBN: 978-1-943491-15-5

by Rachel Groves ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2018

This cat’s cradle of characters and storylines—in which intersections are sometimes fleeting, sometimes acute, sometimes...

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“There is the surface, and there is everything underneath” might be the motto of these 11 connected stories following the lives of students from a New Jersey high school into their 30s.

In 1996, 15-year-old Tess naively yearns to save her adored older brother from moving into a halfway house after a stint in rehab his senior year. In realizing she can’t protect him, Tess establishes newcomer Groves’ theme: how coping with the loss of innocence forms a person. Menacing male figures, dead-end jobs, and drug use are reoccurring motifs. The storytelling is not straightforward; it follows no chronology and moves among different contexts and viewpoints. In her 20s, first-grade teacher Amelia avoids dark suspicions concerning her husband by following random news stories, including one about weird Sally from high school running for mayor. Sally seems less weird than sad as a lonely freshman going to desperate measures to befriend popular senior Leslie. And Sally is irrelevant to Leslie’s emotional disintegration in the years after she graduates. Meanwhile, Amelia has abandoned teaching and marriage for waitressing by the time she runs across former classmate James; the dangerously sexy senior on whom Tess’ friend Margo had a crush has become a painfully lonely 35-year-old accountant. Margo, whose adolescence was disrupted by the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, unleashes her repressed rage at her 22nd birthday party. She particularly lashes out at her needy friend Rae, clueless about the trauma readers will later learn Rae suffered after a robbery and rape attempt, a trauma parallel to one Amelia’s ex-sister-in-law, Corrine, handles with a different set of emotional apparatus. Teachers, as parents, also enter the mix. School counselor Mark watches his life collapse after his daughter’s kidnapping in the particularly moving story “Grieving a Life of Water.” By the 20th high school reunion that Tess attends with her brother, futures remain uncertain but not hopeless.

This cat’s cradle of characters and storylines—in which intersections are sometimes fleeting, sometimes acute, sometimes permanent—deftly exposes the challenges, and terrors, of becoming an adult.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-943491-15-5

Page Count: 198

Publisher: BkMk/Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.