An intimate exploration of the unknown territory of desire, destruction, and whatever falls in between.
A young woman’s twin impulses toward sex and death merge into a duty to life in this lush English-translation debut.
The narrator of this lithe, prismatic book is unapologetic about her frank lesbian sexuality. She is a lover, an ardent explorer of the sensual, a student of bodies—including her own—who remains uninterested in the empty moralizing of middle-class values. Born in Barcelona to a family with a deeply neurotic mother, a distant father, and a younger sister interested in fulfilling all the gender norms of womanhood, the narrator struggles not with her sexual orientation but rather with the essential absurdity of a life lived in search of speciously defined material success. Convinced by her mother to get a degree in art history, rather than pursue the urge to create, the narrator spends her post-degree years immersed in books, which she understands as a sort of pleasurable abnegation of the self. She also travels, first leaving Barcelona for a stint as a Spanish tutor in Brussels, where she meets the incomparable Veronika, whose “thick, silken hair...remind[s her] of the surreal bundles of fiber optics that a technician had once threaded through the façade of [her] Barcelona apartment”; spending a brief time as an au pair in Scotland, where she feels that the “anomalous, flat and rich” green of the Scottish landscape “rises like a suffocating tide, floods every cavity, and colonizes the most fertile parts of my ego”; and returning home to Barcelona to eventually settle into work writing articles for a publication that makes her feel “colorless—a dreadful muddle of various hues, an unthinkably grim and grayish green.” Throughout, the narrator is obsessed not only with the physicality of her lovers and the pleasure she finds in their bodies, but also with the solace she perceives in thoughts of death. She has multiple near suicide attempts which are unconsummated not due to a lack of seriousness but rather due to external factors. The narrator seems likely to continue on this way, drifting between lovers and suicide attempts in a lucid swoon of sensation, were it not for the sudden illness of her 6-year old niece, Clàudia, which thrusts her into the unanticipated experience of wonder and reciprocal trust. Prior to this novel, Baltasar published 10 books of poetry in her native Catalan, and her poet’s sense of language as musculature—a body in its own right—flexes in every line of the carefully translated prose.
An intimate exploration of the unknown territory of desire, destruction, and whatever falls in between.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-91150-875-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.
Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love.
Bree is a friendly but standoffish bookstore owner who keeps everyone she knows at arm’s length, from guys she meets in bars to her friends. Mikki is a settled-in-her-routines divorced mother of two, happily a mom, gift-shop owner, and co-parent with her ex-husband, Perry. And Ashley is a young, very-much-in-love bakery owner specializing in muffins who devotes herself to giving back to the community through a nonprofit that helps community members develop skills and find jobs. When the women meet drooling over a boardwalk storefront that none of them can afford on her own, a plan is hatched to divide the space in three, and a friendship—and business partnership—is born. An impromptu celebration on the beach at sunset with champagne becomes a weekly touchpoint to their lives as they learn more about each other and themselves. Their friendship blossoms as they help each other, offering support, hard truths, and loving backup. Author Mallery has created a delightful story of friendship between three women that also offers a variety of love stories as they fall in love, make mistakes, and figure out how to be the best—albeit still flawed—versions of themselves. The men are similarly flawed and human. While the story comes down clearly on the side of all-encompassing love, Mallery has struck a careful balance: There is just enough sex to be spicy, just enough swearing to be naughty, and just enough heartbreak to avoid being cloying.
A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-778-38608-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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