An impressive and luminous assemblage of artful and quietly devastating tales.
A Canadian author incorporates themes of loss, betrayal, redemption, and hope in this short story collection.
Having published numerous short story anthologies, Speak reaffirms her grasp of the form with 12 resonant tales. The brilliant, darkly comic opener and one of the book’s standouts, “Rock Paper Scissors,” is a master class in characterization. The story introduces Alice, 60, who, despite being divorced and depressed, anchors a rudderless, dysfunctional band of walking disasters. These include her unemployed adult son; her philandering boss; a daughter and fiance desperately struggling with artificial insemination; her infirm mother; and a dying boyfriend. It is a seemingly hopeless situation peopled by the downtrodden. This type of scenario surfaces in other tales like “Wilderness,” about a husband who prepares his dying wife for assisted suicide, and “Lake of Many Islands,” in which a group of friends assembles for a weekend of unexpected revelations. The engrossing title story features a disillusioned, aging artist abandoned by her partner only to discover a new love—one just as bruised by life as she is—waiting on her doorstep. The author’s prose is blissfully lyrical and often descriptively sets each tale’s tone in a single sentence. Impatient people beaten down by a winter season stomp across a snowy sidewalk “with the teeth of their winter boots, they have assaulted it with their demand for spring”; folks consumed with soul-searching do so with the passion of “a detective out to find a missing person”; first snowflakes are as “large as goose feathers turning in the air, perfect and pure.” Speak’s stories champion aging underdogs, many addled by disease or discontent, and throughout their grief or despair, she demonstrates an acute sensitivity to their plights. Into tales that could become overly sentimental, she injects redemption and sacrifice, as evidenced in the collection’s best-realized entry, “Honour,” leavening what seems like perennial hopelessness with glimmers of fun, renewal, and promise. The author rises to the challenge of compiling a group of Canada-set stories that will enchant with the beautiful, diverse, and ever evolving essence of human nature. As one character adores another’s wrinkles and sees “all the beauty life has wrought in her face,” readers will appreciate how Speak translates life’s pain and struggles into beauty.
An impressive and luminous assemblage of artful and quietly devastating tales.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-912298-7
Page Count: 348
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
