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Perfume & Pain

Anna Dorn. Simon & Schuster, $18.99 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-1-6680-4717-0

In the rollicking latest from Dorn (Exalted), a writer gets canceled after calling herself a “female faggot” during an event at a West Hollywood bookstore. Disgraced by her public shaming, Astrid Dahl returns to her writing group, Sapphic Scribes, in search of inspiration and support. While her agent anxiously awaits her next manuscript, Astrid exchanges flirty messages with her crush Ivy, discovers an attraction to her nosy older neighbor, Penelope, and receives endless affection from the gorgeous Kat Gold, a movie star who “preys on tragic dykes all the time.” These new prospects prompt Astrid to try and kick her addiction to what she calls the “Patricia Highsmith,” a simultaneous bingeing of Adderall, booze, cigarettes, and sativa; and to break away from the “deranged” Sapphic Scribes. When Ivy reveals her jealous side after discovering that Astrid might have feelings for Penelope, she puts the gritty details of their text message exchange online and Astrid must live in fear of her image getting tarnished once again. Drawing inspiration from the eccentricities of the internet (on finding her agent, Astrid writes: “I sent her my gay Kendall Jenner fanfic, and the rest is history”), Dorn keeps her finger squarely on the pulse. This brash novel pushes the envelope in all the best ways. Agent: Sarah Phair, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (May)

Reviewed on 04/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Please Stop Trying to Leave Me

Alana Saab. Vintage, $18 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-593-68678-2

A lesbian woman grapples with her literary ambitions and deteriorating mental health in Saab’s engrossing debut. Norma, 27, believes she sees spiritual signs in Instagram ads about the value of “letting things go that no longer serve you,” which she interprets as messages from God that she should break up with her girlfriend. Her new therapist diagnoses her with a major depressive disorder and depersonalization and derealization disorder, the symptoms of which Norma calls her “oblivion.” The ensuing narrative forays into Norma’s tumultuous childhood, her past sexual relationships with men, and her uncertainty over whether to stay with her girlfriend. Saab achieves a sense of urgency in Norma’s stream-of-consciousness narration of her therapy sessions, and in her desire to finish her story collection after convincing an agent to take a look, but it’s sacrificed to the many pages of Norma’s rough-hewn manuscripts, which she submits to a creative writing class. Still, Saab deserves credit for her freewheeling accounts of her protagonist’s therapy sessions and for questioning what it means to heal. There’s promise in Saab’s affecting and singular exploration of a woman’s attempts to live and write with mental illness. Agent: Mina Hamedi, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)

Reviewed on 04/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Pearce Oysters

Joselyn Takacs. Zibby, $27.99 (384p) ISBN 978-1-958506-58-5

A family of Louisiana oyster farmers deals with the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in Takacs’s intense debut. Jordan Pearce, 34, works the oyster leases he inherited from his late father five years earlier. He sends paychecks to his younger brother, Benny, who co-owns the business but refuses to work on the boats and rarely visits, preferring to pose as a starving anarchist in New Orleans. When the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon explodes and oil pours into the Gulf of Mexico, the company that contracted the rig hatches a plan to use toxic dispersants for the cleanup. Jordan pleads for Benny to return and help harvest the oysters while they still can. Benny, freshly dumped by his girlfriend after cheating on her, slinks home. As uncertainty about the future and threats to their health mount, Jordan starts dating a Native American bartender, his mother develops a worsening addiction to Xanax, and Benny, who is bisexual, begins sleeping with a Salvadoran day laborer. Though the supporting characters feel underdeveloped, Takacs captures the emotional toll of the disaster on the Pearces. It’s a devastating portait of the human cost of ecological destruction. Agent: Maria Whelan, InkWell Management. (June)

Reviewed on 04/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Little Rot

Akwaeke Emezi. Riverhead, $29 (288p) ISBN 978-0-525-54163-9

Emezi (The Death of Vivek Oji) unspools a web of erotic danger in their entertaining latest. Kalu, a young man in New Lagos, Nigeria, is dumped by Aima, his girlfriend of four years. That night, Kalu attends a high-priced sex party run by his friend Ahmed. There, Kalu witnesses an older man having sex with a handcuffed younger woman who appears to be a teen. Believing he is witnessing a rape, Kalu forcefully pulls the older man away, to the chagrin of Ahmed, who claims it was all consensual role play and that the man, a megachurch pastor known as Daddy O, is a good customer. As the narrative shifts focus from one member of Aima and Kalu’s wealthy world to the next, subplots, side characters, and sex scenes abound. Meanwhile, Kalu finds himself in increasing peril, as an incensed Daddy O calls for his murder. Emezi keeps the proliferating plotlines together by the power of coincidence—a crucial set of keys appears at just the right time, as does a hidden wad of cash—which gives the story both the convolution and the pleasure of a soap opera. Readers in search of a decadent good time will find it here. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Four Squares

Bobby Finger. Putnam, $29 (336p) ISBN 978-0-593-71355-6

Finger’s affectionate and evocative sophomore novel (after The Old Place) alternates between two distinct periods in a writer’s life. In 1992, 30-year-old Artie Anderson meets a married man named Abe at Julius’, the Greenwich Village gay bar, and feels a mix of friction and attraction (“He may be a little prickly, but he makes me confident”) that turns out to be a harbinger for their fraught sexual relationship. Thirty years later, in 2022, Abe has been dead for 18 years, and his widow and pregnant daughter—whom Artie has kept in touch with—are moving to Seattle. Feeling adrift, Artie volunteers at GALS, a gay and lesbian senior center. After he has an accident and breaks his foot, he returns to GALS as a member and befriends the folks he was helping. He gets particularly chummy with Carson, a new member who offers the promise of romance and inspires Artie to write a sequel to Four Squares, the book he published about his friends when he was 30. Though the wistful digressions into Artie’s past tend to lose momentum, he makes for an endearing protagonist, one who is deeply shaped by his evolving feelings for others in his life. Admirers of Finger’s first book will love this. Agent: Kate McKean, Morhaim Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 04/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers

Bruce Wagner. Arcade, $26.99 (312p) ISBN 978-1-64821-041-9

Wagner (I’m Losing You) shines with “The Met Gala,” a devilish and dizzying novella about a wealthy Hollywood family, but stumbles in “Tales of Saints and Seekers,” a curious gathering of pseudo-philosophical allegories, making for a mismatched bundle. The first entry stars the glamorous and fractured Coldstream family: divorced “chic billionairess” Corinne; her snarky queer ex-husband Dax; their older daughter Candida, 21, a struggling and suicidal actor; and their “darkly funny” trans daughter Charlie, 16, whom they named after the Revlon perfume. Charlie is obsessed with sought-after fashion designer Rick Owens, who’s creating dazzling outfits for the family’s annual Met Gala appearance, while Candida joins her friend Talula in the “Houseless Hook-Up Challenge,” in which they each have sex with a random person who’s living on the street. When Corinne accidentally hits and kills two children while driving her Rolls-Royce, the “family fixer” rushes into action. The volume’s second section is a collection of brisk Southern California–based spiritual parables adapted from Aesop, Greek Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, and Sufi wisdom, among other sources. In them, screenwriters, actors, therapists, and other Los Angelenos are caught in wry mishaps where their inexperience, arrogance, prejudices, or spiritual deficiencies lead to opportunities for enlightenment. These vignettes, however soulful they may be, pale in comparison to the masterly satire of “The Met Gala.” It’s a mixed bag. (June)

Reviewed on 04/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Morning Pages

Kate Feiffer. Regalo, $28.99 (384p) ISBN 979-8-88845-131-1

Children’s book author Feiffer (No Go Sleep!) centers her winning adult debut on a playwright floundering amid family drama and a pressing deadline. Elise Hellman jumps at the chance to write a new play to be helmed by a popular director. Though the script is due in just 65 days, Elise, who divorced her husband, Elliot, two years earlier and raises their unmotivated and withdrawn teen son, Marsden, takes the job while contending with pressure from a friend to lose her “divorce virginity” to a handsome stranger and interruptions from her mother, Trudy. Elsie has made a habit of keeping her distance from Trudy, who taught Marsden curse words when he was in kindergarten, but it’s harder now that Trudy is showing signs of dementia. As Elsie writes her play, which is about a middle-aged woman whose bickering parents move in with her just as she reunites with a love interest from college, she processes various elements of her emotional baggage, such as lingering feelings for Elliot and Trudy’s uncertain future. Feiffer endears readers to her overextended protagonist by capturing Elise’s frustration at being unable to communicate with her family members and the relief of her eventual creative breakthrough. Those in the mood for a lighthearted story that deals with some darker family themes will appreciate this. (May)

Reviewed on 04/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Girl from the Grand Hotel

Camille Aubray. Blackstone, $26.99 (320p) ISBN 979-8-212-41723-5

Aubray’s fun and surprising third novel (after 2021’s The Godmothers) follows a 20-year-old American woman on the French Riviera during the birth of the Cannes Film Festival in summer 1939. Earlier in the year, Annabel Faucon faced the untimely deaths of her mother and father, from the flu and a heart attack, respectively. Her uncle JP, who manages the Grand Hôtel du Cap des Rêves, invites her to visit and offers her a job typing up scripts for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who befriends Annabel and warns her about fickle Hollywood types. Annabel also acts as a translator and tour guide for matinee idol Jack Cabot and his German actor girlfriend Téa Marlo. Annabel quickly falls for Jack, who’s trying to scout locations to make his own film. The initial two-thirds of the novel verge on frothy escapism as Annabel hobnobs with the rich and famous, who conveniently take a shine to her, but all the while Aubray has set the stage for deeper themes of exploitation, the reach of fascism, and the limits of political loyalty, as Téa is frequently courted by Nazi officials who want her to do favors for their regime and Jack schemes to make Annabel a star. Readers will be swept away. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

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You’re Safe Here

Leslie Stephens. Gallery, $27 (320p) ISBN 978-1-6680-3431-6

In Stephens’s dramatic dystopian debut, set in 2060, fiancées Noa and Maggie each try to find their place in another woman’s powerful wellness empire. WellCorp, the company run by tech and wellness guru Emmett Neal, provides at-home sanctuary “nests.” Now, Emmett has extended her reach with WellPods, which float in the Pacific Ocean and provide their solo passengers with two months to “regroup in unencumbered isolation and then be, effectively, reborn.” Maggie, a 25-year-old artist, was among the first to sign up for a WellPod voyage, hoping to find a way forward with Noa, a 38-year-old coder for WellCorp. The two were inseparable at first, but after Noa received a dream job at the company, they began to drift apart. Far away in the ocean, Maggie now enjoys her regimented days of AI therapy and machine-made meals, while back at WellCorp, Noa begins to doubt the integrity of the pods thanks to a damning magazine exposé, an approaching storm, and a culture of corporate secrecy. She fights to reunite with Maggie despite the pain each caused the other before Maggie’s departure. Though the ending feels contrived, Stephens deserves praise for seamlessly interweaving a chilling tech dystopia, a corporate thriller, and a rocky romance. It’s a heart-pumping ride. Agent: Claire Friedman, InkWell Management. (June)

Reviewed on 04/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Rufi Thorpe. Morrow, $28 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-335658-0

Thorpe (The Knockout Queen) returns with a tender and offbeat story of sex work and teen parenthood. Margo, 19, gets pregnant by her college English professor, who, along with her mother, wants her to have an abortion. She has the baby anyway and struggles to keep up with rent before reaching out to her father, Jinx, a retired professional wrestler and heroin addict who wasn’t around for much of her childhood. It turns out Jinx has recently left rehab and needs a place to live, so he moves in and helps Margo take care of the baby, whom she’s named Bodhi. With Jinx watching Bodhi, Margo finds time to explore online sex work. She briefs Jinx, with whom she has a candid relationship, on her new income stream, and he reluctantly offers advice on her OnlyFans account. Margo enjoys the work and quickly gains subscribers, but her popularity brings trouble when Bodhi’s father learns what she’s up to and disapproves, leading to a fight for custody. Thorpe infuses the portrayal of Margo and Jinx’s relationship with sweetness, and she makes Margo a character to root for as the young mother learns how to support herself with help from her unconventional family. Once this gets its hooks into the reader, it doesn’t let go. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary Management. (June)

Correction: A previous version of this review mischaracterized Jinx’s reaction to learning about Margo’s OnlyFans account.

Reviewed on 04/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

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