Carefully paced and beautifully written, this edgy coming-of-age novel succeeds on all counts.
An 18-year-old girl in Manhattan faces the troubled summer of 1986.
In an author’s note prefacing her terrific debut, Weiner explains that she was inspired by her experiences during the summer of what became known as the Preppy Murder in Central Park. Her title quotes Sigmund Freud’s characterization of the effects of cocaine, a reference that occurs to her intelligent, articulate, insecure protagonist, Nina Jacobs, as she’s about to try the drug for the first time with her new friend Stephanie. It’s the summer before Nina leaves for college at Vanderbilt, and she spends her days temping at office jobs—there’s one working for a hotel chain, inputting the reports of undercover investigators on a Wang word processor; another, at an almanac that made incorrect weather predictions, has her sorting hate mail. By night, she hangs out with her friends at a bar called Flanagan’s, where they don’t card the underage patrons. There, she meets an extraordinarily handsome but moody boy named Gardner Reed, with whom she and every other girl in the place are wholly infatuated. Also taking up real estate in Nina’s anxious brain is her mother, whose mental illness manifests alternately as immobilizing despair, random cruelty, and—after a medication change—manic wordplay and shopping. Weiner’s recreation of the period and the milieu—the headlines, the music, the products—is like a perfect pointillist painting, all the tiny details adding up to a richly textured, authentic impression of the city as it was in that decade. Each of her young female characters—from the badass Stephanie, who snorts coke between customers at the fancy Maison Rouge housewares shop, to the snooty Holland Nichols, Gardner’s girlfriend at the beginning of the novel, to the crude but ballsy Alison Bloch, who’s braver than Nina in calling out the casual antisemitism of their prep school friends—is fully three-dimensional. With the strong young characters and the skin-crawling atmosphere created by creepy men, crimes in the news, porn shops, and overheated adolescent sexuality, the book recalls another excellent true crime–inspired novel, Emma Cline’s The Girls.
Carefully paced and beautifully written, this edgy coming-of-age novel succeeds on all counts.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798843
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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