A chilling view of womanhood—made up of lies, secrets, and fear—expressed in elegant prose.
While the girls and women who inhabit Cohen’s 14 stories share tangential relationships, what most binds this collection together is a sense of overpowering dread.
“Naughty,” about a little girl named Amelia who's convinced her infant sister is a changeling, sets the horror-story tone for what follows. Nothing supernatural, or exactly murderous, happens, but the emotional menace swirling under the characters’ skins continually threatens to erupt—and sometimes does—into public chaos. So in “Bad Words,” second grader Yael reacts to her Orthodox Jewish parents’ impending divorce with a taboo dinner request, fully aware that “eating a cheeseburger is the same thing as killing someone.” By “A Girl of a Certain Age,” Yael has grown into a young woman fascinated by the murder of a co-worker by her seemingly normal fiance. In “Guns Are Safer for Children Than Laundry Detergent,” she creates an imaginary child with her boyfriend to avoid having a real baby. College student Sophie, who is Amelia’s former classmate and Yael’s future roommate, becomes the surrogate mother for a creepy professor and his wife in "Surrogate"; years later, in “Odd Goods,” she accuses another creepy academic of sexual harassment, exaggerating the details if not the truth. Meanwhile, Amelia reaches adolescence with a serious eating disorder. In “Expecting,” she’s described as “more virus than girl” by the teacher whose life spirals into lies after she and Amelia catch each other puking in the bathroom. Cohen’s girls and women are damaged but not evil. Addicted to small lies and thievery, Amelia’s sister, Karin, is also drawn to protecting others: a sometime classmate “allergic to the sun” in “Recess Brides”; a severely disabled child in “Old for Your Age, Tall for Your Height”; and skeletal Amelia in “Care.” Years later, in "Wife," Karin has an epiphany: “She wasn’t going to be a filthy whore. It was a terrible thing to realize, that she actually was what everyone took her for: wife, mother, schoolteacher.” Being ordinary is what scares these troubled women most.
A chilling view of womanhood—made up of lies, secrets, and fear—expressed in elegant prose.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63246-099-8
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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