A stunning book that speaks aloud thoughts the reader believed had been theirs alone in long nursery hours of the night.
An intimate exploration of the brutal wonders of motherhood.
Anna, a Danish author, and Aksel, a Swedish playwright, have just had their first baby. Or they are pregnant with their first baby. Or their eldest child is turning 4 and Anna is pregnant with their second. All these time frames are alternatingly true in this heady, iconoclastic examination of Anna’s journey through pregnancy and into motherhood. In the decentralized space of the novel, Anna’s diaries and journal notes have been compiled in a chronology that appears random, but would be better described as intuitive, by an unnamed curatorial presence to whom Anna has entrusted “the pages [that] lay haphazardly in a large pile.” This curatorial presence ascribes a pattern to Anna’s thoughts, which veer steeply into a dark psychology of anxiety, isolation, and fear as the pregnancy progresses, a condition that worsens in the early years of the child’s infancy. Anna describes the book she herself is writing in these pages as a “dirty book, a misshapen book, a book cut wrong….A book written in the child’s time. A chopped-up, stuttering book. A book with bottomless holes to fall into, like never-ending breastfeedings…a book that creates space for pain and from this space engenders a possible future happiness,” upon which the curatorial presence seeks to impose some kind of transliterated order. The fact that the curatorial presence is likely also the author, that Anna herself is an invention created to preserve a necessary distance between the experience of pain and the arrangement of pain into art, does nothing to lessen the intensity of the intimacy created between the reader and Anna. As page after page unfolds—sometimes in diary entries, sometimes in verse, sometimes in recorded scraps of pregnancy advice or ad copy—what is created is an unflinchingly honest reflection of a woman’s experience of her own body as it becomes a body that belongs also to the child. This experience includes beauty and pain, rage and tenderness, fear, suspicion, doubt, and the imperative Anna feels to do her work: the work of writing, of mothering, but above all, as Anna says, “These parts of me, separate yet linked, to connect them, to gather them in one place; that is my work.”
A stunning book that speaks aloud thoughts the reader believed had been theirs alone in long nursery hours of the night.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780811234719
Page Count: 416
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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