Feh.
Eleven dark tales offer a perplexing take on the Festival of Lights.
Christmas crime stories often focus on the more secular aspects of the holiday: shopping, presents, parties, snow. But many of the stories Goldberg selects seem to regard Hanukkah—a relatively minor festival—as deeply religious and widely observed, even by secular Jews. The tension between characters’ focus on celebrating the holiday correctly and the egregious aspects of their personal behavior is unsettling. In David L. Ulin’s “Shamash,” an aging man becomes increasingly obsessed with his grandmother’s menorah as his traumatic past prods him to violence. In James D.F. Hannah’s “Twenty Centuries,” a mother turns her back on the death of her adult child to go home and light candles with her new husband. A spurned girlfriend uses a Hanukkah party to get revenge against her boyfriend in Liska Jacobs’ “Dead Weight,” and the annual Hanukkah party at Sucks to Be U Records, with a carefully curated menu of Jewish delicacies, has an equally grisly finale in Jim Ruland’s “The Demo.” A self-diagnosed sociopath loses it when her no-good brother-in-law disrupts her family’s latke celebration in Stefanie Leder’s “Not a Dinner Party Person.” And editor Goldberg seems to regard his hero’s string of thefts, drug deals, and causal mayhem as some sort of Maccabean victory. Only in Lee Goldberg’s “If I Were a Rich Man” does the hero recognize the irony of his appropriation of Jewish cultural symbols in facilitating his crimes.
Feh.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781641296137
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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