A cleareyed and engaging, if familiar, apocalyptic yarn.
A young man heads across the Atlantic, seeking refuge on a rapidly collapsing planet.
We meet 20-year-old Lark, the narrator of House’s seventh novel, on an overcrowded yacht full of refugees headed from Maine to Ireland. Climate change has sparked devastating fires across America, and aggressive, heavily armed militias enforce a hard-line religious doctrine that makes Lark a target as a gay man. After an arduous trek across the sea that kills many of the passengers, including both of his parents, Lark arrives in Ireland on little more than a rumor that he’ll have a safe haven in Glendalough, a spiritually blessed place said to be both progressive and spared the worst of the climate disaster. Along the way he befriends a dog—a rare creature now in this cruel hellscape—and a woman savvy about the landscape and its threats. House delivers this straightforward adventure with efficiency and poignancy, capturing the brief idyll of freedom Lark and his family enjoyed before leaving and the newfound appreciation he has for an environment and liberal society that are both rapidly collapsing. And the novel’s style has a clarity and rough-hewn simplicity that bring the story’s conflicts into sharp relief. (It’s no accident that the dog is named Seamus, a tribute to the Irish Nobel winner Seamus Heaney, the earthiest of great Irish poets.) The novel’s chief flaw is its overfamiliarity, to the point of almost feeling like a pastiche of dystopian-novel plots and styles: At various points the story contains echoes of The Dog Stars, I Am Legend, The Road, American War, Station Eleven, and more. House seamlessly works in present-day concerns about rampant fundamentalism and willful ignorance about climate catastrophe, but for anybody well versed in the genre, this will feel like well-trod ground.
A cleareyed and engaging, if familiar, apocalyptic yarn.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64375-159-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.
After a loss, a young British woman from a Ghanaian family reassesses her responsibilities.
Her name is Maddie, but the young protagonist in George’s engaging coming-of-age novel has always been known to her family as Maame, meaning woman. On the surface, this nickname is praise for Maddie’s reliability. Though she’s only 25, she works full time at a London publishing house and cares for her father, who’s in the late stages of Parkinson’s disease. Maddie’s older brother, James, has little interest in helping out, and their mother is living in Ghana and running the business she inherited from her own father. When she needs money, she always calls Maddie, who shoulders these expectations and burdens without complaint, never telling her friends about her frustrations: “We’re Ghanaian, so we do things differently” is an idea that's ingrained in her. Her only confidant is Google, to whom she types desperate questions and gets only moderately helpful responses. (Google does not truly understand the demands of a religious yet remote African-born mother.) But when Maddie loses her job and tragedy strikes, she begins to question the limits of family duty and wonders what sort of life she can create for herself. With a light but firm touch, George illustrates the casual racism a young Black woman can face in the British (or American) workplace and how cultural barriers can stand in the way of aspects of contemporary life such as understanding and treating depression. She examines Maddie’s awkward steps toward adulthood and its messy stew of responsibility, love, and sex with insight and compassion. The key to writing a memorable bildungsroman is creating an unforgettable character, and George has fashioned an appealing hero here: You can’t help but root for Maddie’s emancipation. Funny, awkward, and sometimes painful, her blossoming is a real delight to witness.
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-2502-8252-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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