With this exhilarating and unforgettable work, Solomon proves to be a formidable writer.
A family tragedy occasions this startling reimagination of the haunted-house genre.
Ezri Maxwell and their sisters, Eve and Emmanuelle, have begun receiving increasingly alarming texts from their mother. Or, rather, someone claiming to be their mother. When Ezri was a teen, admission to Oxford University granted them—Black, nonbinary, and neurodivergent—the ideal escape from the hostile, entirely white gated community outside of Dallas in which their parents, seeking upward mobility, made a home. Ezri’s childhood was haunted by frightening, unexplainable occurrences for which they were often blamed, and they’ve been estranged from their parents since leaving home. The siblings have suspected for years that something dark, supernatural, haunts the rooms of 677 Acacia Drive. Yet their parents—unyielding, clinging to their upper-middle-class life—have refused to budge. When communication abruptly stops between their sisters and parents, Ezri must return to Dallas with their daughter, Elijah, in tow. After nearly two decades, Ezri revisits 677, where they find both parents dead. Though the local police report that the Maxwells planned a murder-suicide, the siblings are far from convinced. They can’t agree, however, on whether their parents were killed by supernatural forces or not. In evocative prose, Solomon harnesses and recasts classic horror tropes to tell an original story of race and class, family, trauma, and grief. Each character—including the parents—is finely rendered, with the dynamic among the siblings illustrating the ways loyalties shift and change, in constant renegotiation, and dramatizing the ruptures activated by traumatic events. The novel’s construction is elliptical, with past and present alternating from chapter to chapter. Most are narrated by Ezri, with a few shifts in perspective. While this may throw some readers off, the twists and turns are carefully drawn, with the tension mounting toward a shocking end. Readers should be aware that the novel features themes of grooming and child sex abuse, and Solomon is thoughtful in their treatment of these heavy issues.
With this exhilarating and unforgettable work, Solomon proves to be a formidable writer.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780374607135
Page Count: 304
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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