A funny, dark, and deeply human novel about what shapes us as human beings.
A poet attempts to make sense of his dysfunctional history in Hunt’s comic novel.
Cary Scott never stood a chance. He stumbled upon his beloved grandfather’s dead body on his first day of kindergarten. His merciless mother dressed him up as a woman to humiliate him in front of his Cub Scout troop. His closeted father ran off with his closeted uncle. His grandmother forced enemas on him when she decided he was constipated. In high school, he was so terrified of gym class—where he was caught with an erection in the boys’ shower—that he faked stigmata to be excused. Cary’s one moment in the sun came when he wrote a poem about a streaker that got published in the local paper, then adapted into a top-10 hit by country artist Kitty Belle Crawford. He has never followed up on that success, however, and 10 years later he is an obese, single, self-loathing poet with no other published work and a severe eating disorder. Leaping back and forth between childhood traumas and the yo-yo dieting and personal humiliations of his adulthood, Hunt’s novel follows Cary’s unlikely journey toward self-understanding via recovered memory therapy—though whether the memories he ends up recovering are true (and what they might mean for his sense of himself) is not so cut and dried. The writing is as psychologically acute as it is funny, as here when Cary attends an eating disorder conference: “If I were a food, I’d be devil’s food cake,” he explains during an exercise. “I’m sweet and people should like me, but liking me is forbidden. I’m dark and black inside and am quite bad for you if you take me in anything other than small doses. That’s because I’m loaded with fat. Fat and sin.” Hunt is a masterful storyteller, escalating his protagonist’s misadventures to the point of farcical truth. Cary feels just responsible enough for his predicaments to make him a compellingly tragic figure, someone whose larger-than-life problems feel both real and searingly relevant to the reader.
A funny, dark, and deeply human novel about what shapes us as human beings.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781915785435
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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