A lighthearted yet profound assemblage; every story here is a little miracle.
Sixteen stories illuminate the wonder of human connection in Heefner’s collection.
To read this debut collection is to confront the messy, fragile, joyful business of being alive. “Everyone is their most interesting while they’re becoming their best, not after,” says the eponymous character in “What Crissy Calls Becoming,” a wildly unpredictable story about a man who’s unlucky in love, his new acquaintance, and the intense, more-than-friends/less-than-lovers relationship they develop. It is this “becoming” that unites the characters in these stories, a broad cast that hails from all over the map: They are from South Dakota and Oregon, Idaho and Kentucky; they are lawyers and store clerks, waitresses and car salesmen; they are children caring for their aging parents and divorced people looking to find love again, criminals on the run and spouses madly in love after years of marriage. All of them are searching for paths to their true and better selves. When an armed man threatens a cashier in “From Hibernation,” Olaf can’t help but intervene to protect his colleague—a heroic act that earns the attention of a local sheriff and threatens to expose Olaf’s murky past. A recovering alcoholic in “Nosy SOB” becomes obsessed with the woman whose life he may have saved in a traffic accident, looking for ways to get in touch with her. “I Want To See Your Hand” follows Pam as she attempts to make amends with the woman her father unintentionally crippled years earlier. And in the title story, a tragedy at the Adult Sunday School sparks a man’s heartbreaking journey to come to terms with his father’s suicide. While the plots are sometimes overly intricate and hard to grasp, these stories reward a second read. The author writes with an impeccable eye for detail and endless reserves of warmth and humor—his sentences deftly capture the mundane and the sublime.
A lighthearted yet profound assemblage; every story here is a little miracle.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dont Wake Me Fiction LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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