Ambitious, inventive, and aggressively repellent.
The author of the story collection Reptile House (2015) explores human vengeance and deep time in her first novel.
“Once, here, on this high plain, there were only Horse, Bear, Rhino. No words to put to things, no call to put them. But today? Ginny and Dan in the barn, and words like this: ‘You fucked me over. You fuckin’ fucked me over.’ " Ginny and Dan are trying to help a mare give birth to a foal that’s too big for her while they argue about the fact that Ginny has been unfaithful to Dan. The opening passage begins with an observation that encompasses the vast sweep of life on this planet and then zooms in on a contemporary scene that’s obscene, filthy, and brutal. This is a pretty good preview of what’s to come. Ginny and Dan will take increasingly elaborate measures to help their horse survive giving birth. Their community assembles to help them. The gathering turns into a party, and any sense that this is mutual aid—rather than the desire to treat suffering as entertainment—quickly dissipates. Rescuing a mare in distress is simply the excuse that brings together people eager to punish a woman who has transgressed. While it would be a mistake to call this novel a Western, it most definitely engages with ideas about the American West. McLean is innovative in reminding us that humans and other animals inhabit a landscape that other animals occupied first. The meanings we impose are, from the vantage point of life on Earth, neither inevitable nor universal. She is, however, hardly new in interrogating cowboy mythology, and it’s hard to not see some of her choices as redundant. It’s clear, for example, that her use of the word Indian conveys a perspective and that her characters’ conversations about Indigenous people tell us something about them. But there’s a point at which an omniscient narrator that’s casually racist becomes a slap in the face. And readers will have to decide for themselves if they want to know what comes next in a novel that spends its first 65 pages recounting the ugly details of a single night that ends with a woman being gang-raped and thrown into a pit filled with lime on top of a stillborn foal.
Ambitious, inventive, and aggressively repellent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-913505-14-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.
A free-spirited woman forges a career as a writer and journalist, risking scandal and war zones to follow her heart.
Allende’s latest opens in San Francisco in 1873, introducing Emilia at age 7, the illegitimate daughter of Molly Walsh, who, as a novice nun, was seduced and abandoned by wealthy Chilean Gonzalo Andrés del Valle. Molly goes on to a successful marriage, Emilia grows up with a loving stepfather, and at 17 she begins writing, then publishing, sensational dime novels under the pseudonym Brandon J. Price. By 23, she’s a journalist with a column in The Daily Examiner, though still forced to hide her gender behind her pen name. Rule breaking is in her nature, and while she accepts, for now, lower pay than men, she decides on a trip to New York to take a lover and learns to control her own contraception. Later, finally writing under her own name, she’s commissioned to go to Chile and cover its civil war from a human angle, accompanied by colleague and friend Eric Whelan, whose focus is the military aspect. Chilean revolutionary politics make for less sprightly reading, but Emilia’s individual encounters with members of high and low society lend atmosphere. These include the president, a great aunt, and eventually her father—now alone, regretful, and mortally ill. Although he disapproves of working women, the two share a “desire to see the world and experience everything intensely,” and when he offers to recognize Emilia as his legitimate child, she accepts. Now the story gathers pace, with Emilia—always and predictably the rebel—witnessing the horrors of battle, discovering that she and Eric are in love, and getting arrested. Not quite plausibly, she instigates a further sequence of impulsive moves before the story is permitted to conclude.
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593975091
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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