This tragicomic bildungsroman in the shadow of loss will invade your heart and hold on tight.
In her second novel, Espach portrays a family coming to terms with, and never coming to terms with, the loss of their eldest daughter.
As a young teenager, Sally Holt is in awe of her older sister, Kathy, who seems to have all the answers to life’s questions. But when Kathy dies in a car crash, Sally is left to grow up in the shadow of her loss. Espach makes an interesting choice in her title, describing the event not as a death but rather a disappearance. What’s the difference? The first means gone forever. The second is more ambiguous. Like Schrödinger’s cat, neither alive nor dead, the disappeared one lingers, always just about to walk in the door. As Sally progresses through high school and into adulthood, Kathy is frozen in place—a confidante she addresses throughout the novel. And Sally doesn’t beat around the bush. Her unflinchingly honest, sardonic take on the dissolution of her normal family life and coming to terms with loss makes the novel. It’s as if Sally’s parents have forgotten that they still have another daughter. When Sally’s mother turns to electroconvulsive shock therapy to blot out the memory of her first daughter, she loses the rest of her memory as well. Sally’s father engages in risky behavior, from alcoholism to cutting down old-growth trees in the yard (he found a tutorial on YouTube). Through Sally’s eyes, Espach crafts her characters with an emotional depth that powers the story while still leaving room for laughter. Espach’s character development also helps make the romantic plots feel fresh. The story of 28-year-old Sally’s relationship with her bland but stable fiance seems like it was pulled straight from the second half of Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle; a vanilla relationship provides the stability Sally needs even though they lack chemistry. On the other hand, Sally's relationship with Billy, Kathy’s boyfriend and the driver in the fateful accident, brings some Dawson’s Creek incestuousness.
This tragicomic bildungsroman in the shadow of loss will invade your heart and hold on tight.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-82314-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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