Central Places

August 1, 2022

In Allen's wrap-up to the "Black Girls Must Die Exhausted" trilogy, Tabitha Walker balances new motherhood, new job possibilities, new friendship issues, and an ultimatum from boyfriend Marc about their relationship, and she's beginning to wonder if she really believes that Black Girls Must Have It All (75,000-copy paperback and 20,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Central Places, a debut from journalist Cai, Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, IL, for a big-deal job in Manhattan but is returning home to introduce star-worthy fianc� Ben to her hectoring parents and ignored friends; she also reconnects with laidback Kyle, the only person who ever understood her. DeFino moves from The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers (And Their Muses) to Varina Palladino's Jersey Italian Love Story, which features a widow whose mother and daughter conspire to get her dating again (50,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Harper's Back in a Spell, puissant witch Nineve Blackmoore has been abandoned at the altar by her fianc�e and ends up on an awkward and ultimately antagonistic first date with nonbinary townie Morty Gutierrez (angry that her family wants to buy out his pub); then Morty unexpectedly starts acquiring magical powers. In Lipman's genre-blending Ms. Demeanor, big-deal lawyer Jane Morgan loses both career and social life after a busybody neighbor reports her for having hot sex on the rooftop of her New York apartment building, then faces more trouble when the neighbor winds up poisoned and leaves a note implicating Jane (100,000-copy first printing). From Pen/Faulkner finalist Salesses, The Sense of Wonder stars Won Lee, the first Asian American in the NBA, whose seven-game winning streak wins him the moniker "The Wonder"--all witnessed by sportswriter Robert Sung and studio producer Carrie Kang, with whom Won launches a relationship (50,000-copy first printing). In debuter Shroff's The Bandit Queens, a young Indian woman named Geeta is suspected of killing her long-vanished husband, which proves beneficial--no one wants to cross her--and then uncomfortable as other women push her for advice on getting rid of their husbands. After surviving his car's plunge off a cliff in Normandy, Charles Vincent, Steel's latest protagonist, is nursed back to health by a kind woman he stumbles across in a nearby cabin and realizes that he could vanish from his unhappy life Without a Trace. In Zigman's Small World, Joyce invites sister Lydia to move into her Cambridge apartment (if only temporarily) when Lydia returns east from California, but the two divorcees find their relationship disrupted by memories of their deceased sister (60,000-copy first printing).

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October 31, 2022
Cai’s uneven debut follows a newly engaged 27-year-old Chinese American woman who brings her white fiancé to her suburban Illinois hometown to meet her difficult mother and ailing father. Audrey, who works in sales for a magazine in New York City, reluctantly takes blue-blooded Ben, a photographer, with her to her hated hometown. Ben pushed for the trip, and he wins immediate approval from Audrey’s hen-pecked father, while Audrey’s stern mother reverts to her old habit of making Audrey feel like a constant disappointment. Ben does his best until a family night out at the Olive Garden, where they run into Audrey’s high school crush Kyle Weber, whom Ben talks down to. Making matters worse, Ben cuts the visit short after landing a plum assignment. Reunited with Kyle, Audrey thinks back on how they understood each other at their majority-white high school, as his mother is Mexican. Cai does a good job showing how Audrey was shaped by her mother’s disapproval, and there are plenty of engaging insights on race and class. On the other hand, the drawn-out passages on Audrey’s rekindled feelings for Kyle, which play a big part in shaping the final act, are a bit wearing. There seem to be two books at play, and one works better than the other.

November 1, 2022
Audrey thought she had left Hickory Grove firmly behind her when she moved to New York. Eight years after leaving the small town in central Illinois, with only occasional calls to her Chinese immigrant parents, her anxiety is high as she returns with her white fianc�, Ben, for a visit shortly before Christmas. Before long, she runs into her high-school crush, Kyle, one of the only people who understood her during her tough teenage years. But Kyle's warmth is tempered by her former best friend's coldness and the shocking news that Audrey's prom date died of an overdose. As Christmas approaches, Audrey and her mother circle each other warily, the weight of her mother's disappointment and expectations hanging over each tense exchange, and Ben's generous good humor erodes until he gets called away by work. Audrey is confronted by her past and uncertain about her future, as she searches for a life she can truly call her own, an effort complicated by a legacy of displacement. An unflinching but warmhearted examination of a young woman at a crossroads.

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March 15, 2023
A newly engaged woman's long-delayed return to her central Illinois hometown forces her to confront the person she used to be. Audrey Zhou, a 27-year-old Chinese American woman, insists that her first visit to Hickory Grove in eight years is her fiance's idea. The Christmas visit is planned both to introduce Ben, a White photojournalist, to Audrey's parents and for Audrey to accompany her father to an upcoming endoscopy. Shepherding Ben around, Audrey sees her hometown through his ever present camera lens. Returning to the predominantly White, Christian, rural town forces Audrey to confront her relationships with her parents and her fiance and her identity as the only child of Chinese immigrants. When Ben is offered an assignment in California and the postponement of her father's procedure extends her visit, Audrey's prodigal-daughter attempt crumbles. At the intersection of her past and present, she is left to contend with the collision of "new Audrey" and "old Audrey," spurred toward self-destruction while uncertain which self it is she wishes to destroy. Ben is a familiar type of well-meaning White man, passionately addressing microaggressions on her behalf. His inability to comprehend Audrey's formative years makes it clear that he is more of a character-growth yardstick for her than a romantic hero. The predictable plot--Audrey herself compares the reappearance of a hometown crush to a Hallmark movie--verges on dull at times. It is Audrey's relationship with her parents, nearly estranged at first and then rendered through shouting matches and silences, that Cai has portrayed with tenderness and savvy. Audrey's efforts to understand and be understood by her mother, whose approval she has always found unobtainable, nudge her closer to understanding herself. Studded with emotional insights--a worthwhile debut.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.