A quiet, endearing novel about a woman who refuses to go gently into her golden years.
An elderly woman decides to take care of some long overdue business in Boerner’s latest novel.
Eighty-one-year-old Bernice Hart doesn’t want to move into her daughter’s carriage house in Atlanta. She’s lived in her cottage in the small Arkansas town of Savage Crossing for six decades—she raised two children there and buried a son and a husband—and if she has to leave it, she’s going to do it her way even if that means she’s running away without a word to anyone: “She would slip away undetected, not in search of one last great adventure, nor as an attention-seeking antic sure to upset her family. Bernice had only one goal: She wanted to live out the remainder of her life on her own terms.” With her car (Miss Fiona) packed with only her dearest possessions and her cat, Dolly Parton, Bernice hits the road for Lake Norfork in the Ozarks, the place where she used to go on vacation as a teen. She has unfinished business there related to the first man she ever loved, the aptly named John Marvel. But is an old woman with a bad hip and a slipping memory really up to a quest of such magnitude? Boerner’s evocative prose expertly captures what it’s like to be in Bernice’s head: “Old Bernice would never have spent a moment on her porch in Savage Crossing on a chilly November morning, but new Bernice was plenty warm wearing her wool coat over her flannel nightgown….How many things had Bernice not done because she had been too tired or too cold or too worried? She hated to imagine it.” The novel unfurls at a leisurely pace—as leisurely as an octogenarian puttering along in a car called Miss Fiona—and it goes on about 50 pages too long. Its unhurriedness is part of its charm, however. While the story never goes anywhere too surprising, it succeeds in capturing a certain time of life and the way the past never seems to loosen its grip on the present.
A quiet, endearing novel about a woman who refuses to go gently into her golden years.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-951418-06-9
Page Count: 403
Publisher: One Mississippi Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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