“A suspenseful account of twin sisters and their secret lives.” i’ll be you
writing might have offered more emotional heft. However, if the characters do behave as expected, the book places them within an unending cycle of leaving and coming, illustrating the point that when colonists occupy and then abandon a country, autocracy and other humanitarian disasters ensue. The author does a good job connecting the dots between his characters’ stories and the negative consequences of colonialism.
GIRLS THEY WRITE SONGS ABOUT
Bauer, Carlene Farrar, Straus and Giroux (320 pp.) $27.00 | June 21, 2022 978-0-374-28226-4
A suspenseful account of twin sisters and their secret lives. Sam and Elli are identical twins who spent their childhood years, and then their teenage ones, as actors. Now grown, they’ve also grown apart—Elli in the direction of a husband, a career as a florist, and an upper-middle-class life; Sam in a downward spiral of addiction. Then Sam, one year sober—a year in which she hasn’t spoken with Elli— gets a call from their parents: Elli has gone away to some sort of spa; could Sam help out with the little girl she adopted? Sam arrives to find everything slightly awry: Elli’s incommunicado, their mother’s in denial, and meanwhile, Sam finds some worrying paperwork at Elli’s house. What’s this organization Elli’s
y o u n g a d u lt
A deep friendship takes shape and dissolves in New York City. “Rose and I moved to New York to be motherless,” begins narrator Charlotte as she sweeps us into the idealism of her 20s in the late-1990s New York literary scene. She and Rose meet in the office of a music magazine where Rose—intense, ambitious, erratic—works in the staff writer position for which Charlotte—meticulous, careful, self-effacing—was passed over. What begins as professional and sexual jealousy morphs into an intimate friendship as the two bond over their commitment to independence and artistic integrity. Alcohol-soaked parties, abortions, marriages, affairs, a divorce, a death in the family, secrets, and betrayals all ensue, related with such cleareyed precision and honesty that only on the rarest of occasions does it tip over into sentimentality. Charlotte’s narration rings true for the discerning writer and editor she is; the prose is razor-sharp and utterly devoid of clutter. Though as a person she drifts and waffles—“What did we want?” is a common refrain throughout—as a storyteller, she never loses focus. Motherless though Charlotte had once aspired to be, as her 20s turn into her 30s and early 40s, the question of motherhood creeps in, whether from her surroundings in stroller-laden Park Slope, from friendships that drift when children arrive, or from a confrontation with the child of a married man with whom she’s had an affair. With deftness and candor, Bauer tells a moving and thoughtful story of how desire and ambition change over time and how to make sense of the messiness of carving out a path and life of one’s own. A smart and beautifully rendered portrait of two women’s lives.
I’LL BE YOU
Brown, Janelle Random House (368 pp.) $28.00 | April 26, 2022 978-0-525-47918-5
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kirkus.com
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fiction
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15 april 2022
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15
