A poignant portrait of one fallible, wise woman and a corner of one of New York’s most vibrant immigrant communities.
A Dominican woman in her mid-50s living in Washington Heights must find a job while facing the forces of gentrification, globalization, and the Great Recession.
It’s 2009, and while “El Obama” works to piece together a shattered economy, Cara Romero, at age 56, must find a job of her own. She’s been unemployed for two years, since the factory where she worked for most of her life in the United States moved abroad. As part of a Senior Workforce Program in New York, she sits down with a city employee, a younger Dominican American woman, for 12 sessions during which they will work together to find Cara a job that matches her skills and interests. Throughout the sessions, with wit and warmth, author Cruz explores Cara’s upbringing in the Dominican Republic, journey to the United States, estrangement from her only child, relationship to her sister and extended family, and commitment to her Washington Heights community. The potency of Cara’s first-person voice as she speaks to the job counselor is undeniable, including some delicious multilingual turns of phrase. Cruz intersperses the 12 sessions with documents like rent notices from Cara’s building and job application materials she must complete, including a “Career Skills Matcher,” all of which work together to demonstrate both the power of bureaucracy to complicate a person’s life and the ability of paperwork to tell one version of a person’s story while often hiding what makes a life truly rich.
A poignant portrait of one fallible, wise woman and a corner of one of New York’s most vibrant immigrant communities.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-20845-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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