“When the world’s first Category 6 storm destroys Miami and Houston, a FEMA megashelter in Oklahoma becomes part of the setting for the harsh aftermath.” the displacements
independent. And you don’t have to be married to be loved.” As in her debut, Evvie Drake Starts Over (2019), Holmes displays a gift for warm, richly drawn characters and situations that are as cozy as a steaming cup of tea. Laurie is refreshing as a heroine who is entering her 40s, a size 18, and completely comfortable with her life as an unmarried, child-free woman. There are no dramatics or big fights between her and Nick—just a believable adult relationship with real-world obstacles. A charming and easygoing look at all kinds of love and the beauty of independence, featuring supremely likable characters.
THE DISPLACEMENTS
Holsinger, Bruce Riverhead (448 pp.) $27.00 | July 5, 2022 978-0-593-18971-9
THE PINK HOTEL
Jacobs, Liska MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (336 pp.) $27.00 | July 19, 2022 978-0-3746-0315-1 Two newlyweds honeymoon in a Los Angeles hotel for the uber-wealthy while fires ravage the city. When Kit and Keith Collins arrive at the luxurious Pink Hotel, Kit has no idea their stay is doubling as an extended job interview. Although the couple has met success—the restaurant
y o u n g a d u lt
When the world’s first Category 6 storm destroys Miami and Houston, a FEMA megashelter in Oklahoma becomes part of the setting for the harsh aftermath, measured in unraveling lives. “Twenty-four hours ago I was a wealthy surgeon’s wife leaving my huge house with three kids and a dog in a hybrid SUV. Now I’m a sweating, penniless refugee dragging a wheelie bag up a rural road.” In the lingo of Holsinger’s ambitious novel, former rich White lady and sculptor Daphne Larsen-Hall is now an IDP, an Internally Displaced Person—aka a Luna, for the hurricane that created a whole new class of Americans, numbering in the millions. Luna “strikes Miami as if beating on some mountain-size drum....She moves like a drunken butcher, flaying skyscrapers, eviscerating offices and conference rooms and lobbies....The guts of civilization swarm and fly: desks, chairs, tables, carpets, lights, plants, computers, printers, books, and papers by the billions, landing in the rivered streets, pulped through the sewer channels, chewed by the winds.” Holsinger’s lush writing about the storm is complemented by “The Great Displacement: A Digital Chronicle of the Luna Migration,” an interactive website including interview transcripts, maps, and charts, displayed here as screenshots. For example, one survivor, now a Ph.D. in critical disaster studies, reports, “Doesn’t surprise me that what finally focused the nation’s attention on the megashelters was that spectacle in Oklahoma, what went down at Tooley Farm. There you had a perfect storm of climate change, displacement, extremism, and racial difference swirling around these white bodies at the center of it all, the big pale eye of the storm.” Interspersed with these reports are chapters telling Daphne’s story as well as those of her three difficult children (her teenage stepson, Gavin, maliciously leaves her purse in the driveway when they flee); the African American woman who runs Tooley Farm for FEMA; the drug dealer/insurance agent who is there to squeeze every penny he can get out of the refugees; and his sidekick/ girlfriend, a guitar player who starts the cover band that gives the book its title. From Range, a complicated street game all
the children are playing, to wildfire, the opiate many of their parents are getting addicted to, Holsinger’s storm of invented detail is Category 6. Brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly believable. Seems destined to be a blockbuster.
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kirkus.com
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fiction
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15 may 2022
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