A work that glimmers with insight, acumen, and an unwillingness to settle for simple answers.
A graphic novelist contends with her maternal family’s complicated history.
When Hulls was growing up, her grandmother was a constant but ill-defined presence “who shuffled around our house in gray Costco sweatpants.” The author knew only three things about her mother’s mother, Sun Yi: She was from China, she had once been a journalist and had written a bestselling memoir, and “long ago, something happened and she lost her mind.” In her astonishing first book, Hulls sets out to discover not only what happened to her grandmother and how those events shaped her mother’s upbringing, but how all of the above informed her own relationship with her mother and the world around her. She discovered that after years of harassment by the newly empowered Communist party, Sun Yi had fled to Hong Kong with her young daughter—the illegitimate child of a Swiss diplomat—in tow. There she enrolled her daughter in a prestigious school, wrote her memoir, and suffered a breakdown from which she would never fully recover. Hulls relates all this material in pages as meticulously researched as they are lushly drawn. She analyzes not only the cultural and historical context of her grandmother’s and mother’s lives, but also her own motivations, assumptions, and failures to truly understand and empathize with that maternal line. In her willingness to examine each troubling detail, the author is painstakingly thorough and relentlessly honest. “Sometimes I feel so angry at Sun Yi and how her damage stacked the deck against my mom,” Hulls writes. “But I also see flickers of something much harder to stomach, where I use her as an easy target because I don’t know how to feel the anger toward my mom.” From start to finish, this book is a revelation.
A work that glimmers with insight, acumen, and an unwillingness to settle for simple answers.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780374601652
Page Count: 400
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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