A big-hearted, often amusing tale of the weirdness of suburbia.
Suburban neighbors hunt for a mysterious interloper in Semegran’s novel.
Seff leads a quiet life with his wife in suburban Austin, Texas. Usually, the most colorful part of his day is sharing a few beers on the deck with his neighbor Big Dave, the proud sort of Texan who thinks nothing of shooting at a squirrel on his roof with a silenced Glock. When pets start to go missing around the neighborhood, Seff and Dave form a task force to get to the bottom of the mystery. The two men are soon surveilling the area with video cameras, chasing after shadowy figures in the dark, and getting pepper-sprayed by teens for their trouble. Just as they are about to give up, they capture something sinister on the cameras: a ghostly, glowing, naked figure wearing only running shoes and a pair of pantyhose pulled over his head. “[L]ooking like a naked bank robber ready for a jog—a thin and lanky, athletic, white praying mantis—he got really close to the camera and waved,” narrates Seff in horror. The only option, as they see it, is to form a posse to bring down this deranged culprit. Can the neighborhood—and Seff and Dave’s friendship—survive their ad hoc vigilantism? The novel takes the form of a series of vignettes depicting life in the neighborhood interspersed between chapters related more directly to Seff and Big Dave’s quest. Their odd-couple friendship—Seff is a progressive writer-type while Big Dave is an unapologetically MAGA plumber—forms the heart of the book. Semegran eschews injecting serious political conflict into the relationship, presenting Dave as a self-aware sitcom reactionary. “She is missing,” Big Dave chides Seff when he misgenders a dog. “You gotta get the pronouns of all the animals correct these days or the kids will cancel your ass on the interwebs and the social apps and such.” In a time of political polarization, the author offers an encouraging tale of neighborliness and camaraderie in the face of the unknown.
A big-hearted, often amusing tale of the weirdness of suburbia.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798218415945
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Mutt Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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