A luminous, richly textured portrait of family and faith, beautifully written and vividly remembered.
In this warmhearted memoir, a woman looks back on an Appalachian girlhood colored by the tug of war between her fundamentalist religion and her yearning for glamor.
Hatton recaps her early years growing up in 1960s Jackson County, Kentucky, in a working-class family—her father worked in a rubber factory, her mother was a housewife—and the pious congregation of the Big Hill Free Pentecostal Holiness Church. Much of the book covers ordinary events in a child’s life at the time: the author’s first day at school and her separation anxiety giving way to joy at her first reading lesson; a stint in the hospital with rheumatic fever that left her with a heart murmur; processing the assassination of President Kennedy, which some in her family mourned and others viewed with grim satisfaction because of his suspect Catholicism; and family rituals, from the yearly slaughtering of pigs to the weekly oyster stew feast. Hatton also profiles her enormous extended family, including her philandering grandpa, who died in a car crash beside a woman who was not his wife. She steeps readers in her church meetings, which featured energetic hymns and dancing, speaking in tongues, and prophesying whenever the spirit moved worshippers. The congregation was a straight-laced group that called themselves the Saints, strictly adhered to the “King James Virgin” of the Bible, as one member called it, and prohibited drinking, smoking, fancy clothes, and putting on airs. This troubled Hatton because she daydreamed about growing up to marry a rich man, live in a mansion, and wear the latest fashions and jewelry, like her idol Jackie Kennedy—an ambition that moved her to shoplift a forbidden lipstick from a dime store.
Hatton’s reminiscences paint an engrossing panorama of tightknit communities that embraced but also confined people. Her writing is wittily alive to class tensions—her mother used the term “Higher-Ups” to denote those with the money and status to look down on them—and the mordantly humorous mark they leave on hillbilly self-awareness. Her Pentecostal church is the antithesis of the Higher-Ups culture of hierarchy and decorum, thriving instead on the self-taught religiosity of its blue-collar pastors and the wild enthusiasms of their flock, which Hatton captures with an electrifying immediacy (“When the Holy Ghost came over him, Brother Junior’s dancing was potentially dangerous to anything in his path….[He] sailed over two rows of seats as effortlessly as a whitetail deer clearing a fence…and sprinted back and forth down the center aisle, pumping his fists above his head as he hollered, ‘Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!’”). This material could have turned into kitsch, but Hatton avoids that by plumbing the complex inner lives of her relatives in evocative prose that teases out conflicted personalities and dark familial antagonisms in sharp detail. (Hatton writes of her Aunt Edythe’s nervous breakdown: “She muttered to herself and seemed frustrated by what she heard. Mommy tried brightly and a little too loudly to engage her in the women’s brave and desperate conversation. Aunt Edythe briefly made eye contact with her, silently communicating such intense annoyance and hatred that Mommy was unnerved.”) The result is a colorful, touching recreation of small-town life.
A luminous, richly textured portrait of family and faith, beautifully written and vividly remembered.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781736402610
Page Count: 242
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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