“A singular collection that probes the most foundational rituals of human society.” life ceremony
SUCH A GOOD MOTHER
Monks Takhar, Helen Random House (320 pp.) $17.00 paper | Aug. 2, 2022 978-1-9848-5599-2
Danger and chaos ensue when a financially struggling British mother sends her child to an elite elementary school in their up-and-coming neighborhood. Despite the school’s obvious flaws— which mostly center around the dangerously competitive nature of the other parents—Rose O’Connell, a junior bank teller with a haunted past, is determined to send her son to the Woolf Academy, where children are molded for success from a very young age. Considering that Rose went to the same school back when it was a regular public high school in a seedy neighborhood and she was known as the daughter of an infamous con man, this seems like an effort to overcome the ghosts of her traumatic teenage years, which come up frequently. These same issues compel Rose to obsess over fitting into the circle of mothers who rule the school, which is the main conflict driving the plot. Though Rose’s psychological motivations are clear, it can be hard to stomach her need to fit in with these intolerable women. Rose herself is hard to like, with her oppressive insecurity and overpowering naïveté in regard to social norms and life in general. Her marriage is in trouble, and she’s hardly making ends meet, but all she seems to care about is getting those other mothers to like her. The stakes never feel high enough, and despite some twists and turns, the book lacks thrills. There’s nothing shocking about people with money battling for power, even if it involves schoolchildren, nor is school choice a matter of life and death. Though the desire to give one’s children every opportunity for success is understandable, Rose would have been better off sending her son somewhere else and saving herself the trouble. Less a story about motherhood than a lesson about how grade school politics can last into adulthood.
ACTS OF VIOLET
Montimore, Margarita Flatiron Books (336 pp.) $27.99 | July 5, 2022 978-1-250-81506-4 A winding tale of two sisters pulled together and pushed apart by fame, magic, and the cult of celebrity. After a yearslong hiatus from performing following a disastrous Las Vegas show, Violet Volk—magician, self-help author, motivational speaker, and celebrity—stages a comeback in her hometown of Willow Glen, New Jersey. But during the big disappearing-act finale, the Flaming Angel, she fails to reappear as expected. Slowly, the audience and security come to realize that Violet is well and truly gone. Ten years later, her 36
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15 june 2022
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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fans—the Wolf Pack—have remained obsessed with her disappearance, and the annual candlelight vigil at the location of her last show will be a huge event to mark the anniversary. Her sister, Sasha Dwyer, is still angry at Violet in the way that only sisters can be: for slights perceived and real, for actions that hurt her and those she loves. Sasha’s husband, Gabriel, has spent decades trying to protect her from the worst of Violet’s egoism. Their daughter, Quinn, is nearing college graduation and trying to figure out her future, her past, and what it means to be Violet Volk’s niece. A podcast about Violet’s life and disappearance is being taped, and host Cameron Frank is pulling out all the stops to try to get Sasha to appear. Author Montimore has written a layered story told in fragments of documents, emails, podcast transcripts, and narrated segments that jump through time, place, and voice. It’s a whirlwind of information and characters, much like a magic show with smoke, mirrors, and misdirection consuming the viewer’s attention before the final big reveal: Is Violet alive or dead? And if she is alive, where has she been for 10 years? A story of the lifetime bonds of sisterhood that also touches on the paranormal subtext inherent in magic acts.
LIFE CEREMONY
Murata, Sayaka Trans. by Ginny Tapley Takemori Grove (256 pp.) $25.00 | July 5, 2022 978-0-8021-5958-8 A singular collection that probes the most foundational rituals of human society. “Everyone always says that things like common sense or instinct or morals are carved in stone,” Yamamoto, an affable 39-year-old businessman, muses. “But…actually, they’re always changing….It’s always been that way.” In her debut short story collection, the author of Convenience Store Woman (2016) investigates the validity of our most basic rituals—how humans eat, marry, procreate, and die— and incisively explores the rich, messy stuff left behind once they’re violated. “A First-Rate Material,” set in a society that repurposes the body parts of dead people into home goods, features a woman who desperately covets a ring made from human bone despite her fiance’s steadfast disapproval. The unsettling “Poochie” features two elementary school girls who adopt a suit-wearing former businessman as a pet; when they suspect his escape, the girls confront the idea of owning any living thing. “A Magnificent Spread” and “Eating the City” unpack the strangeness surrounding food rituals. The title story explores a society whose severe population shrinkage has turned procreation “into a form of social justice,” spurring the creation of “life ceremonies”—wakelike celebrations that involve partaking of the deceased’s body and finding an “insemination partner” for “copulation.” “Recently I’d been getting the feeling that humans had begun to resemble cockroaches in their habits,” the dubious businesswoman Maho muses, given their propensity to
