The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.

October 1, 2021

Following some attention-getting short stories, Ali's Good Intentions features a young British Pakistani man named Nur who must break it to his family on New Year's Eve that the woman he truly loves isn't Pakistani but Black (60,000-copy first printing). Set in Trinidad and Tobago, Banwo's When We Were Birds brings together Yejide, raised in a Port Angeles house built on the remains of a plantation whose owners enslaved her ancestors and left unprepared by her mother for her task in life--ferrying the city's souls into the afterlife--and Darwin, who must disregard the religious commandments of his true-believing Rastafarian mother and accept the only job he can find: that of grave digger. Stuck on her dissertation about the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou, Taiwanese American Ingrid Yang follows down a mysterious archival reference in Chou's Disorientation and ends up acknowledging her anger with academia and white institutions generally. Following up Clark's own questions about the children of victims of Argentina's Dirty War in the 1970s, On a Night of a Thousand Stars features Paloma, an Argentine diplomat's college-age daughter, whose probing questions about her father's involvement in the military dictatorship put her family, her sense of self, and her very life in danger (30,000-copy first printing). In Friedman's Here Lies, climate change-mauled 2040s Louisiana requires cremation rather than burial at death, and Alma fights to reclaim her mother's ashes for a final journey. Cofounder of the Lit Camp Writers Conference, Kravetz reimagines events surrounding the composition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar in The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., which are related from the perspectives of Plath's psychiatrist, a nasty rival poet, and a curator years later (100,000-copy first printing). A Canadian film and television producer (she's responsible for the hit CBC series Little Mosque on the Prairie), Nawaz crafts the story of a feckless young woman whose new imam expects better of her, and though there's the risk that Jameela Green Ruins Everything, she is on the case in an absurdist sort of way when he disappears. In Ronan's Chevy's in the Hole, a white man struggling to kick his drug habit and a Black woman working as an urban farmer try to make a go of it together in Flint, MI, as the water is becoming poisoned, with family histories woven in (50,000-copy first printing). In Stringfellow's Memphis, ten-year-old Joan flees her father's violence with her mother and sister to the house built in the historic Black district of Memphis by her grandfather, who was lynched only days after becoming the city's first Black detective.

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January 15, 2022
Nonfiction author Kravetz's debut novel is a compelling literary mystery that explores the creation of poet Sylvia Plath's only novel. Organized into nine "stanzas," or sections, the narrative is told over three different timelines by three different women, all connected in some way to Plath. In 2019, Estee, a 65-year-old master curator for a small Boston auction house, must determine whether a set of notebooks found in the attic of a South Boston Victorian is the original manuscript of Plath's semiautobiographical The Bell Jar, published under a pseudonym a few months before her suicide in 1963. As she vets the documents with the assistance of Plath expert Nicolas Jacob, Estee discovers an unexpected personal connection to the poet. Covering the years 1958 to 1963 in a letter addressed to her old poetry professor Robert Lowell, Boston Rhodes, a pen name for the ambitious Agatha White (a thinly veiled Anne Sexton), recounts the seething jealousy that drives her to undermine her literary rival. "Sylvia was a success in all the ways I was not," she notes acidly. In 1953, Ruth Barnhouse, the only female psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, uses unconventional therapies to treat her patients, one of whom is a Miss Plath recovering from a failed suicide attempt. Kravetz skillfully weaves the three storylines into a satisfying whole as the mystery of Plath's journals is resolved. Writing about real literary figures can be tricky, especially if their descendants are still living, but the author brings his characters, both imagined and historical, to life with sensitivity. Of his protagonists, Rhodes is the standout, an unreliable narrator nonpareil whose inner "venom voice...cuts to the marrow of truth." An elegantly written novel for lovers of poetry and literary history.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2022
First-time novelist Kravetz joins a list of fiction writers inspired by the dramatic lives of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, but his focus tilts more toward poets Robert Lowell and, covertly, Anne Sexton. In the present, Estee, a master curator at a Boston auction house, assesses three old spiral notebooks found in an attic by flashy fix-and-flip real-estate agents. In the 1950s, Agatha White, a frustrated suburban wife and mother determined to become a poet, grandstands her way into Lowell's prestigious writing workshop.When revered Plath joins the group, Agatha considers her a rival, while both Lowell and Plath are under the care of innovative psychiatrist Dr. Ruth Barnstone. Estee, Agatha (whose confessional poetry is so shocking her husband insists that she write under a pseudonym), and Ruth are each fighting against dark and treacherous psychic undertows. These fictionalized real-life characters could have inspired a deep inquiry into creativity and madness, poetry and survival. Instead, Kravetz, a magnetizing storyteller with a satiric wit, has crafted an incisive, suspenseful, and head-spinning tale of the perils of artistic obsession, coveted objects, ferocious ambition, and tragic betrayal.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 17, 2022
Journalist and psychotherapist Kravetz (Strange Contagion) makes an engrossing fiction debut with an account of Sylvia Plath and her circle of confessional poets. Estee, a master curator at a struggling auction house in present-day Boston, is nearing retirement when she is handed what proves to be an authentic, handwritten draft of The Bell Jar. Kravetz then takes readers back to the 1950s, where a fictional female writer using the pseudonym Boston Rhodes enrolls in Robert Lowell’s poetry workshop along with Plath, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, and others. Rhodes, obsessively competitive, resorts to blackmail, theft, and plagiarism to eclipse Sylvia, her chief rival. A third narrative comes from Dr. Ruth Barnhouse, the young psychiatry resident at the McLean Hospital who treated Plath for depression and remained the poet’s friend and confidante but was unable to prevent her eventual suicide. The author creates a taut air of tension to the auction house, where the restrained Estee feels disarmed by a young, media-savvy colleague, and delves deeply into the guilt carried by the poets who studied and competed with Plath, including Rhodes, and by the regretful Barnhouse, whose story traces the mental institution’s slow evolution toward more humane, enlightened therapeutic practices. Kravetz brings both authority and empathy to his depictions of mental illness. He also reveals himself to be a fine novelist.