Nuanced, thoughtful, often moving stories.
From three-time O. Henry winner Muñoz, a new and often luminous collection, his third.
Many of the stories gathered here are set in the 1980s and '90s and feature people living in severely straitened and threatened circumstances: the families of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in California's Central Valley who are routinely rounded up by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, repatriated, and then return, again and again; gay men in an age of AIDS and widespread homophobia; trapped and housebound teens. In "The Reason Is Because," we meet a high school girl forced by pregnancy to drop out of school. She lives with her mother and her newborn in near isolation, and the only hope for change anyone seems able even to imagine is a marriage to the swaggering, not-very-bright, and mostly uninterested father. In "Anyone Can Do It," the wife of a fruit picker who (though American-born) has been hauled away with his co-workers by La Migra is swindled out of her chief asset by a neighbor she'd thought an ally. Another standout is the moving title story, in which Mark, a water-company clerk, falls in love with Teddy, a sweet-tempered, beautiful young man who's been hustling in LA, and is surprised when Teddy seems not only willing, but eager to leave the glitz of the city to settle with him in Fresno. Eventually it's revealed that Teddy is dying of AIDS. Mark kicks him out and then—tortured—drives all the way to the small Texas town where Teddy was born and where, it turns out, he has just died. Perhaps best of all is the closer, "What Kind of Fool Am I?" Here we meet a rule-following Texas teen who bristles at the strictures of home and the narrowness of her prospects but sees little way around them. Her bolder or just more desperate younger brother keeps running off, looking for a wider world that might accept him. Her task is to find him and bring him home—until, that is, her brother manages to get far enough away to provide escape velocity for her, too.
Nuanced, thoughtful, often moving stories.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64445-206-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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