An extraordinary debut that insists that we can—and must—mend each other.
Tessa is 27 years old and pregnant with her third child when she runs into her first love, a woman named Mel, and begins to question the life she has built.
Living in a trailer with her husband, Henry, and their children, Preston and Ruby, Tessa feels increasingly smothered by her mother-in-law, Angie, on whose land they reside. Mel's return prompts Tessa to revisit her youth; graphic flashbacks reveal her mother’s abandonment and the harrowing abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather and stepbrother. (Stark’s depiction of those abuses never strays into trauma porn.) The respite Mel’s love offered teenage Tessa was cruelly taken away when Mel left suddenly and Tessa was forced to draw on previously unknown strength to survive. This indirectly leads her into the lives of Henry and Angie and a future filled with love. Adult Tessa's emotional withdrawal from family life exemplifies how trauma can trigger self-sabotage, secrecy, the turning away from those who love us, and the fight-or-flight instinct. The theme of motherhood underpins the novel, specifically the synchronous fragility and resilience of mothers and the hurts done to and by mothers. Caregiving is represented as at once claustrophobic and a source of deep joy: "Honey, tired ain’t something women like you and me get to be. Looking after is what I was built for." In Tessa and Angie’s relationship, Stark captures female solidarity, a shared maternal understanding, and the sacredness of keeping each other's secrets. As Mel’s presence forces Tessa to confront the vast kaleidoscope of her own personhood, the many selves she has inhabited throughout her life, Tessa accepts that she must make peace with what might have been. This agonizingly sad novel nevertheless rejoices in small acts of loving. When Angie observes that "each other is the whole of what we’ve got," Stark offers up a balm to soothe not only Tessa's hurt, but the reader’s.
An extraordinary debut that insists that we can—and must—mend each other.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593656204
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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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