Pristinely characterized, this debut novel is by turns funny and heartrending.
A trans teen helps her English teacher through the fraught process of coming out as transgender in small-town Mitchell, South Dakota.
Thirty-five-year-old Erica Skyberg has always known she was a woman, despite the fact that she’s still Mr. Skyberg to her high school students and, well, to everyone else. Her ex-wife, Connie, with whom Erica is still in love, is pregnant by her new Trump-supporting farmer boyfriend. It’s only when 17-year-old Abigail Hawkes—spiky, foul-mouthed, outspokenly trans—transfers to Mitchell High that Erica has someone to tell her secret to. Abigail’s got enough of her own problems and complications: parents who have kicked her out, a boyfriend whose rich conservative mom is bankrolling a state political campaign for a local transphobic preacher, and Abigail’s own work as a volunteer for the preacher’s Democratic rival. (The novel is set in the autumn preceding the 2016 election, which feels long enough ago in the timeline of transgender politics as to constitute historical fiction.) As the only trans person Erica knows, Abigail reluctantly becomes her sounding board, and Erica feels guilty leaning on her; they gradually grow close even as their relationship draws scrutiny and suspicion from the people around them. Alternating primarily between Erica’s third-person chapters and Abigail’s first-person ones, St. James contrasts Erica’s attempts to be seen for who she really is with Abigail’s thwarted desire for “woodworking,” or disappearing into the woodwork to achieve the normalcy she thinks she so badly wants. (“I’ll be hiding in the walls, trying to be any other girl, like in that one story with the yellow wallpaper,” she vows.) St. James’ plot moves like a Shakespeare comedy—some contrivances, yes, but all in the service of portraying the prismatic variations of the characters here, both cis and trans, who alternately fail themselves and each other, and work to rescue them back again.
Pristinely characterized, this debut novel is by turns funny and heartrending.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781638931478
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crooked Media Reads/Zando
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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