An absurd romp through modern culture with a disarmingly appealing protagonist.
In Bonapace’s satirical novel, a young woman embarks on a strange journey from New Jersey to Bulgaria and back again.
Cristina Acqualina “Tina” Bontempi lives in a flood-prone, illegally rented basement apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, where she barely scrapes by as a realtor. She spends her time smoking cannabis and working out with her fitness-obsessed friend-with-benefits, Steve. Her whole life changes after he gives her a copy of The Bulgarian Training Manual, a physical and mental fitness guide “kept secret by the Communists.” Tina dabbles in some of the manual’s self-help schemes, including a communion-wafer diet (popularized by a 14th-century nun who “helped unify Italy and brought the Pope back to Rome, all the while eating her way across Europe with communion wafers”) and “Hypno-Tan” sessions, which involve a tanning bed and hypnotism. Eventually, she realizes that, despite the “secret” nature of the manual, a surprising number of people at her gym are aware of its existence. She becomes captivated by its teachings, and she finally makes an impulsive decision to fly to Bulgaria to help “restore the Ancient Gym to its place of honor.” After she arrives, she meets a host of quirky characters, including a woman known as Baba Yaga who immediately offers her a communion wafer (“‘Eat,’ she says, ‘but never on the same day as candy corn. It is ancient Bulgarian way’”) and Mohawk, another fitness fanatic who worships the manual’s teachings—and who believes that vital pages are missing from it. It doesn’t take long before some people, including Baba Yaga, suspect that Tina may hold the key to unlocking the guide’s full potential.
As this summary indicates, Bonapace is clearly uninterested in constructing a narrative based in reality. Instead, she presents a tale of a determined protagonist on a weird, winding path toward self-fulfillment, while skewering everything from diet culture and religion to beauty trends and gym bros. Tina’s tough New Jersey attitude sometimes edges a bit too close to parody, but as she apparently bumbles her way toward enlightenment, her brash, unapologetic air makes the story of her hotheaded journey to Bulgaria worth reading. The dialogue is about as realistic as it can be, considering the utterly absurd topics that the characters discuss. But it’s Tina’s narration that proves to be the most entertaining element, as when she ruminates on why Romeo and Juliet has endured: “It said right in the prologue that the play would take two hours. That’s a lot of useful information. Most books don’t do that…Think about it. Shakespeare is still around after all these years for a reason.” Over the course of the novel, there are plenty of moments that will make readers laugh out loud, including the manual’s guide to various bodybuilder meal plans, including a feeding tube diet, a baby food diet, and a virtual diet (in which one simply pretends to eat). It’s a wild ride that’s most fun when readers put their assumptions aside.
An absurd romp through modern culture with a disarmingly appealing protagonist.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781960988102
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Clash Books
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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