to attribute blame for what she believes to be a curse on the household. Interfering with those calculations of guilt are the secrets Valentina’s family has held for generations. As frogs, mosquitos, maggots, and boils (among other horrors) descend on the family, Valentina endeavors to make sense of her place in a world inhospitable to girls seeking freedom and within a family where secrets reign over truths. Manfredi delivers Valentina’s narrative, as translated by Oklap, in a straightforward and unapologetic tone consistent with the bravado and insecurities of adolescence. Familial truth emerges, one way or another, but it may take a few generations before it can be seen.
OUR GEN
McKinney-Whetstone, Diane Amistad/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $26.99 | July 5, 2022 978-0-06-314011-0 For Cynthia, selling her West Philly row house and moving to a swanky senior community in the suburbs seemed like a good idea when her son suggested it. When Cynthia moves to the Sexagenarian, she isn’t exactly thrilled. She misses her neighborhood and the house that saw her through a failed marriage and raising a successful son. While she stands to make a mint on the sale to a young White couple, she also feels troubled by her complicity in gentrification. And she’s concerned about meeting other Black retirees at what everyone calls “the Gen.” But just as when she was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, the people of color find each other, and soon ex–nonprofit director Cynthia, good-time-girl Tish, former(ish) investigator Lavia, and dapper scientist Bloc make a happy foursome, gathering at Tish’s house to eat, dance, watch movies, get high, and unpack their pasts. Sharp observations and spot-on period references land well: Cynthia ruefully reflects on a “career that rose and rose despite the racism, sexism, then petered because of ageism,” and tasty name-checks include Edge of Night and Shake ’n Bake. Less tasty, though far more prevalent: stiff and cursory dialogue, a terrible meet-cute involving a priapism, and truly odd meat metaphors (two separate sets of lips are “thick and salty like seared steak fat” and “like bacon sizzling in a cast-iron pan, plump and glistening”). Cute premise—Black Golden Girls move into Melrose Place—makes a fine pilot pitch. But a novel? Not so much.
28
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15 may 2022
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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TOTAL
Miller, Rebecca Farrar, Straus and Giroux (192 pp.) $25.00 | July 12, 2022 978-0-3742-9911-8 Seven stories focus on the many guises of obsessive (though not particularly sexual or romantic) love, and Miller’s tone is disarmingly matter-of-fact throughout. The protagonists are mostly women, privileged, if not necessarily wealthy, members of the liberal elite. Their passion often centers around children. The opener, “Mrs. Covet,” concerns Daphne, an overwhelmed mother of three, one a newborn, who feels ambivalent about her new nanny; threatened by the nanny’s competence, Daphne also luxuriates in her novel freedom from parental responsibility until a crisis awakens her fierce maternal protectiveness. The mother in “Vapors” is taking her 2-year-old for a walk when she runs into an old lover. Memories of various intensely troubled romantic relationships come flooding back, but none can ultimately compare to her emotional connection to her child. The title story hinges on a science-fiction conceit—social networking technology available only to the well-to-do goes terribly wrong, resulting in the birth of morbidly fragile children who spend their brief lives expensively institutionalized—but it becomes an intense exploration of family ties: When a teenager decides to rescue her younger sister from the institution where their well-meaning, quietly distraught parents have placed her, her plans go awry, but the telling is more sweet than bitter. In “I Want You To Know,” a case of obsessive motherly love gone fatally wrong acts as a plot pivot, a story within the story about a woman coming to grips with the new rural life she’s committed to with her husband. The protagonist in “Receipts” chooses career over family, knowing and accepting the cost. The nature of storytelling is the theme in “She Came to Me,” the only story with a male protagonist, one whose need to feed his creativity in a comically dark, erotic adventure equals his avowed commitment to his family. Finally, “The Chekhovians” is itself a riff on Chekhov: There’s family tragedy, comic class conflict, and an unexpected offer of money. A beautifully constructed, acutely felt, morally honest collection.
