Review by New York Times Review
ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE, by Gail Honeyman. (Penguin, $16.) Eleanor, the socially awkward, terrifically blunt heroine of this quirky novel, is a loner, spending her weekends alone with vodka and frozen pizzas. But a blossoming romance with her office's I.T. specialist, Raymond, and their friendship with an elderly man help stave off isolation, opening them all up to the redemptive power of love. THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich. (Flatiron, $17.99.) The author's work as an intern at the firm that defended an accused murderer and pedophile compels her to re-examine her own past abuse. She devotes herself to finding parallels between her molestation by her grandfather and the firm's client, and indicts what she sees as society's refusal to acknowledge wicked acts. MADE FOR LOVE, by Alissa Nutting. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) After Hazel's husband - a wealthy, manipulative tech visionary - implants a chip into her brain, she leaves him, showing up at her father's senior living community to stay with him and his sex doll. As our reviewer, Merritt Tierce, put it, the novel "crackles and satisfies by all its own weird rules, subversively inventing delight where none should exist." THE OUTER BEACH: A Thousand-Mile Walk on Cape Cod's Atlantic Shore, by Robert Finch. (Norton, $16.95.) Finch, a nature writer, shares 50 years of observations from a stretch of shoreline. The book, arranged chronologically from 1962 to 2016, devotes a chapter to each place up the shore; our reviewer, Fen Montaigne, wrote that "Finch artfully conveys what is, at heart, so stirring about the beach: how its beauty and magisterial power cause us to ponder the larger things in life and drive home our place in the universe." OUT IN THE OPEN, by Jesús Carrasco. Translated by Margaret Juli Costa. (Riverhead, $16.) In this bleak, dystopic debut novel, a young boy flees his tormentors and family's betrayal into a parched, unnamed land. When he is joined by an old goatherd, the pair recalls Don Quixote as they make their way through a merciless world, trying to evade cruelty. Faced with suffering, the novel asks, will we respond with grace? I WAS TOLD TO COME ALONE: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad, by Souad Mekhennet. (St. Martin's Griffin/Henry Holt, $17.99.) As a Muslim of Moroccan descent raised in Germany, Mekhennet, a Washington Post reporter, has been able to access inner circles of Islamic militants. Her book takes readers into the world of jihadi recruiters and their targets, and assesses the risk the West faces.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 8, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Hazel is on the run from the one person she might not be able to escape: her tech-mogul husband, Byron, whose company, Gogol, is far-reaching and powerful. Hazel flees the pristine Gogol complex for her 76-year-old father's trailer, where she is shocked to find that her father is shacking up with a sex doll he has christened Diane. Even more problematic than her father's desire to be alone with his new, fake paramour is the disturbing discovery that Byron has inserted a chip into Hazel's head that allows him to download her memories every day. Byron wants Hazel back, and he is willing to do anything to get her to return to him, whether it's viewing her memories or dropping a virtual bomb on her with facts about her father's health. Just as she did in her first novel, Tampa (2013), Nutting pushes boundaries this time via a subplot with a charming con man who finds himself attracted to dolphins and though it's not as grounded as her debut, Nutting's second outing offers up a sly satire of our tech- and prosperity-obsessed society.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
As she did in Tampa, her first novel about an eighth-grade teacher's affair with a student, Nutting deftly exploits the comic potential of perverse attachments, here to sex dolls, aquatic mammals, and technological devices. Readers of Dave Eggers's The Circle will be familiar with Nutting's caricature of an ominous and ubiquitous technology giant, Gogol Industries, though this cautionary tale packs the profane punch of satirists like Carl Hiaasen. The story begins after a woman, Hazel, has fled her controlling husband, Byron, a cold-blooded, germaphobic, and distinctly un-Byronic tech titan who "treated his electronics like lesser wives." Hazel takes refuge in her father's trailer park home, vastly different from her former lodging, "the Hub," Byron's sterile compound that is at once a prison, spa, and hospital. Living with her father and his recently purchased sex doll, Hazel hopes to avoid Byron's near-omniscient gaze and forge a new, unsurveilled, and thrillingly unhygienic life. Elsewhere Jasper, a handsome hustler whose two great joys are "sex and conning people out of money," has a bizarre encounter with a dolphin, kindling in him an unquenchable cross-species desire. Though Jasper's zany plot strand eventually ties into Hazel's story and touches on relevant themes of anonymity and objectification, it never fully works. Nonetheless, the novel charms in its witty portrait of a woman desperate to reconnect with her humanity. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A glimpse into the futurewhich looks a lot like the presentfrom the author of Tampa (2013) and Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (2011)."Hazel's 76-year-old father had bought a doll. A life-size woman doll. The kind designed to provide a sexual experience that came as close as possible to having sex with a living (or maybe, Hazel thought, a more apt analogy was a very-very-recently deceased) female." These are the first lines of Nutting's second novel (her first book was a collection of short fiction). They are attention-getting, certainly, and the mix of barefaced candor and mordant humor will be familiar to the author's fans, as will the deeply flawed protagonist. Hazel was well on her way to becoming a standard-issue screw-up when she met tech billionaire Byron Gogol. When the story begins, she's trying to escape her marriage to Byronand hoping to avoid being assassinated by her obsessive spouse. Much of the novel is set in 2019, after Hazel has left her husband, but there are flashbacks to her courtshipif we can call it thatand life in Byron's compound. There's also a parallel story about Jasper, a con artist who develops a sexual and romantic attachment to dolphins after a male bottlenose tries to rape him. Nutting's prose style is distinctive, and the narrative is shot through with her inventive language, and she's adept at creating darkly absurd situations. But character-building is not among her strengths. Hazel never quite emerges as a fully formed person, which makes it hard to remain interested in her. The same goes for Jasper. And this novel's pacing is uneven and, ultimately, unsatisfying. While Nutting borrows plot elements from thrillers, narrative momentum is constantly undercut by back story and scenes that are odd and amusing but not entirely necessary. An uneven effort from a terrific writer. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
