questions her desire for a future with Boots. Clive, who parlayed his role as editor of Modern Psychology into a brief career as a talk show host, emerges as a self-styled guru using the free labor of his unquestioning acolytes to create a product that gives clients perfect emotional closure. Crosley has created the ideal protagonist/narrator for navigating this low-key–SF but very real world. Lola is skeptical and prickly while also being vulnerable—a wiseass with a heart. The story is plenty engaging, but it’s Crosley’s analytical acumen and gift for the striking metaphor that really gives the book life. Thoughtfully and humanely acerbic.
HURRICANE GIRL
Dermansky, Marcy Knopf (240 pp.) $26.00 | June 14, 2022 978-0-593-32088-4
Just a little comedy about the loss of all worldly possessions, near-deadly assault, brain surgery, and violent revenge. When we meet Allison Brody, she has just left an abusive movie-producer boyfriend in Los Angeles, driven across the country, and bought a small but sweet foreclosed beach house in North Carolina. Once you get to know the hapless protagonist of Dermansky’s fifth novel, you realize this sequence of decisive actions was a pretty big accomplishment. Allison is plagued by self-doubt (“Maybe leaving had been stupid”), agency is not her strong suit (“Allison was not sure what to do”), and she has no faith to sustain her when, a week and a half later, a storm destroys her new home. (“Such a God, Alison was sure, would have to be a man, and not a particularly nice one.”) Sentences with fewer than 10 words, mostly one-syllable each, are the building blocks of this stripped-down narrative—the tone is so consistent it’s a kind of poetry. “Allison was homeless and she was broke. It was wild how fast the tides could turn. Part of her also knew that she was fine.” Unfortunately, Allison is not all that fine, and the cruel winds of destiny that blew her house down are not finished with her yet. Again Dermansky has come up with a seemingly artless but in fact very controlled novel, focusing this time on the many things other people do to our heads without permission (this is a metaphor with legs, you’ll see). Small comic gems sparkle in their deadpan settings on every page. No matter how bad things get, Alison’s running joke to herself—she still has her health—never ceases to amuse her, though at a certain point, “she did not think anyone else would think it was funny.” She’s wrong about that. The only bad thing about this book is that you will likely finish it in one sitting.
THEATRE OF MARVELS
Dillsworth, Lianne Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $27.99 | April 12, 2022 978-0-35-862-791-3 A young actor in Victorian-era London is determined to save an African woman from an evil theater owner. Twenty-year-old Zillah, the narrator of Dillsworth’s debut novel, has far from a charmed life, but she’s come a long way from “the slums of St. Giles,” the London neighborhood where she was raised. Or has she? The young woman, the child of a Black mother and White father, has an acting gig, but it’s a pretty bad one: She plays the “Great Amazonia,” “a dangerous savage from darkest Africa,” at a theater company run by 12
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1 april 2022
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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