back-to-back shifts as a bartender at a beloved queer dive bar and a baker at a notoriously conservative Christian bakery, and her love life has been nonexistent since the end of a rocky twoyear relationship. But new opportunities soon appear on both the romantic and employment fronts: A sharply dressed woman named Charley flirts with Amy while buying coffee and a croissant, and two strangers Amy befriends at her cousin’s wedding offer to pay her $250 to step in as a bridesmaid for their upcoming nuptials since one of their original bridesmaids is moving to Dubai. With very little ramp-up or to-do, Amy and Charley begin dating seriously; the much longer slow-burn is between Amy and her new bridesmaiding job, which puts her in the middle of the wedding industry at a time when neither she nor any of her friends can legally get married. Dumond’s deep affection for the queer communities that spring up in red states—and especially for the multigenerational mentorship that makes survival and joy possible—is evident, but uneven pacing and a tendency to tell rather than show keep the reader at arm’s length from the action. A sweet but slightly underbaked debut that explores its protagonist’s personal growth more satisfyingly than its romance.
ALL THE THINGS WE DON’T TALK ABOUT
Feltman, Amy Grand Central Publishing (320 pp.) $28.00 | May 24, 2022 978-1-5387-0472-1
A mother’s sudden return forces the lives of a father and child into turmoil. Morgan Flowers, who’s nonbinary, is used to being their neurodivergent father Julian’s emotional caretaker. What Morgan isn’t used to is putting their own wants and needs first. Enter Sadie Gardner, a fellow scholarship student at Morgan’s elite private school, who, much to Morgan’s shock, finds Morgan desirable. Things seem to be going well for Morgan until their mother, Zoe, who struggles with addiction and had taken off years before, comes tearing back into their life like a tornado, showing up unexpectedly at their front door. Thus the careful equilibrium Morgan has worked so hard to maintain comes crashing down: “You need to leave right now, Dad repeated once Morgan rushed him inside. You need to leave right now, Dad repeated while Morgan unzipped his coat and untied his shoes and helped him upstairs and gathered the weighted blanket and laid him down on the bed.” On top of Zoe’s sudden return, Morgan also finds themselves dealing with a blossoming friendship with an internet stranger who thinks they are someone else, the lingering loss of Morgan’s grandmother, whose cardigan still sits on the back of a chair in the house, and a father whose desperate internal desire to love and protect Morgan is followed up with little action. While Feltman’s narrative is, at times, clouded by too much attention given to the lives of secondary and tertiary characters, the complex relationship between Morgan and Julian places this novel solidly in the category of worthwhile reads. A multidimensional family drama.
VALLEYESQUE
Flores, Fernando A. MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (208 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 3, 2022 978-0-3746-0413-4 Bizarre short stories from a Texan with a punk-rock heart. Austin author Flores’ first two books, Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas (2018) and Tears of the Trufflepig (2019), have already made him something of a cult favorite among readers who appreciate his frequently funny, almost always bizarre punkrock sensibilities. His new collection is set in the same off-kilter world as his previous works, but it also expands on it. In “You Got It, Take It Away,” named after the legendary Tejano singer Johnny Canales’ catchphrase, a Mexican American man encounters his difficult, probably racist neighbor, who shows him a mysterious 16
|
15 march 2022
|
fiction
|
kirkus.com
|
