Publishers Weekly
08/15/2016
Zink’s novel of anarchy in life, love, and real estate focuses on Penny Baker, daughter of healing expert and retired shaman Norm Baker, who dies after a prolonged painful illness, leaving behind Penny and her disjointed family. Amalia, Norm’s adopted daughter whom he rescued from a Cartagena garbage dump, is also Norm’s second wife and Penny’s mom. As a not-so-grieving widow, Amalia lusts after hard-hearted Matt, Norm’s oldest son from his first marriage. After seeing Norm through his last days, Penny finds herself homeless, unemployed, and haunted by memories. Matt suggests she reclaim the family’s neglected Jersey City house, but the house, christened “Nicotine” by the anarchist activist squatters who occupy it, has only one vacant room, and it’s filled with toxic waste drums. So Penny moves into another squatter home and visits Nicotine, where she falls for self-proclaimed asexual Rob. In bold strokes, punchy metaphors, and striking imagery, Zink etches her absurdist vision of modern culture, likening Norm’s hospice to a brothel licensed as a strip club because customers must ask for what they want in code (such as sex at the brothel, or quick, painless death through drugs at the hospice). Scenes of watching a loved one die and anarchists giving more family support than family add a touching chord to this impertinent, mordant portrait of a corroded society badly in need of reclamation. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Extraordinary... Get the book for its crackling prose and razor-sharp wit, but ready yourself for its blitzkrieg of startling imagery.” — Village Voice
“Undeniably excellent... Propulsive... This is Zink at her most heartfelt... Zink is an architect. She builds worlds that look a little like ours, but are wrong enough to make one think—really think, not just feel. ” — New Republic
“Intellectually restless, uniquely funny...Propulsive, wonderfully stuffed with irreverent and absorbing banter...What’s most bootylicious in this novel is Zink’s warmhearted embrace of her subjects...One enjoys every minute with these obliging kooks....There may be some readers who want to make out with this book.” — New York Times Book Review
“Smart and often very funny... Even while Zink skewers bohemian stereotypes — the affluent squatter, the chain-smoking environmentalist — she cares for her characters, imbuing them with complicated personalities, causes and sexual proclivities. Rich sensory detail, earnest dialogue and raw emotion...Absorbing, original... Belongs on your fall list.” — Chicago Tribune
“She’s a deadpan comedian, her sentences funny yet plump with existential dread...You’re never tempted to put Ms. Zink’s novels aside. They contain so much backspin and topspin that you’re kept alert by the leaping motion... Her books are sexy... I could listen to Ms. Zink’s dialogue all day.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times
“Even when Zink is being conventional, she’s exemplary. What makes her satire so exciting and so novel is the empathy of her writing... Exciting and provocative... She’s a singular figure in the literary landscape, and Nicotine is a perfect introduction to her brilliant, off-kilter world.” — Vox
“The author’s best work... Zink is a wordsmith’s wordsmith. She’s sharp, wry, and might be a genius.” — The Millions
“A hilarious perversion of the rom-com…Ms. Zink’s 2015 novel Mislaid delightfully sent up racial and gender mores, and here again she has affectionate fun tweaking the pieties of her cast of businessmen, cultists and activists. …Nicotine is light reading in the best sense. Think Wodehouse for millennials.” — Wall Street Journal
“[A] wild and nervy novel. Zink is a master of rapid character development, shifting perspectives, sex scenes and plot twists. … “Nicotine” was so addictive it made me want to reach for a cigarette when I was done.” — Los Angeles Times
“Zink writes some of the most comical lust between “love weasels” in contemporary fiction…[She] excels at scathing set pieces that caustically sum up places and local cultures…She gets her characters in motion, like mismatched roommates in a ramshackle house, and lets us enjoy watching them pinball around.” — Washington Post
“Zink has a sharp knack for illuminating the challenges facing American millennials circa now... [In Nicotine] you’ll find the cutting social commentary and sharply drawn characters of one of this decade’s most promising new novelists.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Zink has instantly become one of the most unusual, refreshing voices in contemporary fiction. Her work is completely unfettered by genteel literary conventions and replete with robust storytelling...Both a satire of and a valentine to the 21st-century counterculture, Nicotine is sexy and political and hilarious.” — Slate
Wall Street Journal
A hilarious perversion of the rom-com…Ms. Zink’s 2015 novel Mislaid delightfully sent up racial and gender mores, and here again she has affectionate fun tweaking the pieties of her cast of businessmen, cultists and activists. …Nicotine is light reading in the best sense. Think Wodehouse for millennials.
|Los Angeles Times
[A] wild and nervy novel. Zink is a master of rapid character development, shifting perspectives, sex scenes and plot twists. … “Nicotine” was so addictive it made me want to reach for a cigarette when I was done.
Washington Post
Zink writes some of the most comical lust between “love weasels” in contemporary fiction…[She] excels at scathing set pieces that caustically sum up places and local cultures…She gets her characters in motion, like mismatched roommates in a ramshackle house, and lets us enjoy watching them pinball around.
Vox
Even when Zink is being conventional, she’s exemplary. What makes her satire so exciting and so novel is the empathy of her writing... Exciting and provocative... She’s a singular figure in the literary landscape, and Nicotine is a perfect introduction to her brilliant, off-kilter world.
New Republic
Undeniably excellent... Propulsive... This is Zink at her most heartfelt... Zink is an architect. She builds worlds that look a little like ours, but are wrong enough to make one think—really think, not just feel.
New York Times Book Review
Intellectually restless, uniquely funny...Propulsive, wonderfully stuffed with irreverent and absorbing banter...What’s most bootylicious in this novel is Zink’s warmhearted embrace of her subjects...One enjoys every minute with these obliging kooks....There may be some readers who want to make out with this book.
Village Voice
Extraordinary... Get the book for its crackling prose and razor-sharp wit, but ready yourself for its blitzkrieg of startling imagery.
Chicago Tribune
Smart and often very funny... Even while Zink skewers bohemian stereotypes — the affluent squatter, the chain-smoking environmentalist — she cares for her characters, imbuing them with complicated personalities, causes and sexual proclivities. Rich sensory detail, earnest dialogue and raw emotion...Absorbing, original... Belongs on your fall list.
The Millions
The author’s best work... Zink is a wordsmith’s wordsmith. She’s sharp, wry, and might be a genius.
Dwight Garner
She’s a deadpan comedian, her sentences funny yet plump with existential dread...You’re never tempted to put Ms. Zink’s novels aside. They contain so much backspin and topspin that you’re kept alert by the leaping motion... Her books are sexy... I could listen to Ms. Zink’s dialogue all day.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Zink has a sharp knack for illuminating the challenges facing American millennials circa now... [In Nicotine] you’ll find the cutting social commentary and sharply drawn characters of one of this decade’s most promising new novelists.
Slate
Zink has instantly become one of the most unusual, refreshing voices in contemporary fiction. Her work is completely unfettered by genteel literary conventions and replete with robust storytelling...Both a satire of and a valentine to the 21st-century counterculture, Nicotine is sexy and political and hilarious.
Washington Post
Zink writes some of the most comical lust between “love weasels” in contemporary fiction…[She] excels at scathing set pieces that caustically sum up places and local cultures…She gets her characters in motion, like mismatched roommates in a ramshackle house, and lets us enjoy watching them pinball around.
Chicago Tribune
Smart and often very funny... Even while Zink skewers bohemian stereotypes — the affluent squatter, the chain-smoking environmentalist — she cares for her characters, imbuing them with complicated personalities, causes and sexual proclivities. Rich sensory detail, earnest dialogue and raw emotion...Absorbing, original... Belongs on your fall list.
Wall Street Journal
A hilarious perversion of the rom-com…Ms. Zink’s 2015 novel Mislaid delightfully sent up racial and gender mores, and here again she has affectionate fun tweaking the pieties of her cast of businessmen, cultists and activists. …Nicotine is light reading in the best sense. Think Wodehouse for millennials.
Los Angeles Times
[A] wild and nervy novel. Zink is a master of rapid character development, shifting perspectives, sex scenes and plot twists. … “Nicotine” was so addictive it made me want to reach for a cigarette when I was done.
Slate
Zink has instantly become one of the most unusual, refreshing voices in contemporary fiction. Her work is completely unfettered by genteel literary conventions and replete with robust storytelling...Both a satire of and a valentine to the 21st-century counterculture, Nicotine is sexy and political and hilarious.
Library Journal
08/01/2016
The day after her father dies, Penny Baker is evicted. A shaman whose "Last Resort" clinic in Brazil eased wealthy clients through their final hours in a haze of herbal supplements and native ritual, Norman Baker ironically suffered the American way of death, with tubes and transfusions in a Manhattan hospital bed. To Penny's mother, Amalia, Norm's passing is a nuisance; to her half-brothers, Matt and Patrick, it's a potential business venture. But for Penny, who cared for him at the end, it's the loss of her North Star. Just out of college, jobless, and homeless, Penny buses out to Jersey City in search of her grandparents' abandoned house, where she discovers a thriving community of disparate squatters and a place that feels like home. Penny's dilemma? How can she embrace the causes of her anarchist friends, remain loyal to her dad's memory, and become a wage-earning adult? VERDICT Zink, whose novel Mislaid entered the literary scene amid effusive praise, writes with tongue firmly in cheek. Her jaded worldview, leavened by a well-honed sense of the absurd, reveals itself as she skewers millennials and boomers alike for failing to live up to their once tightly held convictions. [See Prepub Alert, 4/18/16.]—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-07-19
A rich, rewarding tale of love, rebirth, and chewing tobacco from the author of Mislaid (2015) and The Wallcreeper (2014).When we first meet Penny, she’s 12, naked, and smoking a cigarette in her father’s sweat lodge in upstate New York. Eleven years later, she’s an unemployed business school graduate sitting in her dying father’s New Jersey hospital room. This loss devastates Penny in all the usual ways, and Zink’s depictions of grief and—especially—the strange state of waiting for someone to die are honest and real and occasionally lovely. In one especially heartbreaking scene, Penny realizes that, the closer he gets to death, the less she and Norm have in common. But then: “The strength and courage they desire—and lack, both of them—are the strength and courage never to see each other again. Fear is something they have in common.” This level of self-awareness is one of Penny’s finest qualities as a protagonist. The daughter of a Jewish shamanistic healer and an indigenous Colombian orphan, Penny knows she’s unusual. But she also accepts that being unusual isn’t all that strange, which is why she finds a new family when she sets out to reclaim her father’s ancestral home in Jersey City. Thrown together by the marginalization of tobacco users, the residents of Nicotine—the squat occupying the house where Norm grew up—are outré outsiders even in the outsider realm of activists and agitators. Penny is immediately smitten with the very cute and avowedly asexual Rob. When Penny’s sociopathic half brother, Matt, becomes obsessed with another occupant—a polyamorous Kurdish poet named Jazz—they form an untenable tangle of relationships that can only end in destruction. The resulting disaster is spellbinding, but even the quiet moments here are delightful because Zink does such an incredible job of depicting weirdos as real, smart, vulnerable, complicated people. Social satire with a sharp wit and a big heart.
