An affecting story of personal transformation, as broody as it is erotic.
A stifled Japanese American writer, separated from her family during the pandemic, finds unexpected intimacy with an arborist.
When an unnamed middle-aged writer and professor learns her mother has been diagnosed with dementia, she returns to her Northern California childhood home, leaving her two daughters and husband behind in Hong Kong. This decision coincides with the onset of the pandemic—referred to coyly as “the sickness”—and suddenly what was supposed to be a short stay has no end in sight. Having placed her mother in a care facility, the narrator splits her time between teaching an online college course on Japanese aesthetics; video calling her husband, who is preoccupied by work; and tending to her mother’s expansive but struggling garden. A local nursery recommends she consult with a man known as the Tree Doctor, whose body immediately enthralls her: His eyes “suggested to her something molten whirling around at his core”; his “hands were like the branches of an oak.” What follows is a raw, passionate affair spent between the garden and the bedroom, where the Tree Doctor uncovers a desire the writer is unaccustomed to, and where she pushes herself toward the overlap of pleasure and pain. Isolated from society, she rediscovers herself in her body, invigorated by the idea that she is at her core a piece of nature. “Can you wake up a body the way you can wake up a tree?” she asks, and indeed that seems to be the case. Through a yearning first-person narration, the protagonist’s trials evoke difficult but vital questions about survival and endurance: When does a person admit that a loved one’s declining health can’t be reversed? When does a society concede the fact that “there would never again be a ‘normal’” and learn to adapt? These interrogations are threaded seamlessly into the narrator’s pursuit of her own power, a pursuit that reveals just how liberating the decision to dismantle and reassemble one’s self can be.
An affecting story of personal transformation, as broody as it is erotic.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781644452776
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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