A wickedly funny satire about unscrupulous activism, shady politics, and unhinged parenting.
In Schulze’s novella, a new parent decides to raise his son in an analog-only household and imagines a future revolution.
One night, two weeks after finalizing the adoption of his 4-year-old son Quentin, an unnamed man in Danvers, Massachusetts, is suddenly struck by the enormity of his new responsibilities as a parent. The narrator, who describes himself as a “Zillennial”—someone who’s “too young to remember the 90s but old enough to remember a world before the Internet”—decides that he and his much-older husband, who was born in 1964, will raise Quentin without any modern digital technology. Instead of relying on smartphones and tablets to entertain and educate his son, like other parents, he plans instead to replicate a pre-internet lifestyle to nurture Quentin’s developing mind. As he tucks Quentin into bed, he vows that his son will be “raised right. With love of this world. The real world. IRL.” Invigorated and inspired, the narrator loses himself in an elaborately constructed vision of the future, in which Quentin graduates college with no friends and no career prospects, due to his lack of a digital footprint; after a failed suicide attempt, he creates a web-based manifesto condemning the internet’s infiltration of every aspect of society, and the millennials who encourage such an environment for their children, ending with a call to “#Unplug” that goes very viral. Schulze’s novella is a biting and viciously funny satire about online radicalization, hypocrisy in politics, capitalism, and faux nostalgia. The book is written almost entirely in the future tense, which has the effect of elevating the dry humor to a high level. All the characters (including figments of the narrator’s imagination whom Quentin will allegedly meet) are well developed, and the story flows at a nice pace throughout. Readers may especially enjoy the story’s exploration of intergenerational conflict, as well as the sincerity of the depiction of the existential anxiety of parenthood: “How am I supposed to do this?” the narrator despairs at one point. “How does anybody do this?”
A wickedly funny satire about unscrupulous activism, shady politics, and unhinged parenting.Pub Date: May 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781737037866
Page Count: 187
Publisher: David Schulze Books
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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