Soap opera meets ‘Gossip Girl’
Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark” is so packed with unexpected plot twists that reading it is like dashing between cars on an interstate through a hailstorm of cannonballs with a flimsy umbrella as protection.
Just when you think you’re going to settle in for a few pages, something else happens.
Fans of the Magnolia Parks Universe will enthusiastically welcome this fifth book. Offcenter and proudly off-kilter, “Into the Dark” mesmerizes readers with sometimes stream-of-consciousness storytelling from various characters’viewpoints.
They’re all fabulously rich, famous for it, and just plain fun to watch. But the author reminds us the characters are also people with lives they would like to keep private.
After Jessa Hastings’s self-published Magnolia Parks series went viral on TikTok in early 2022, Gen Z readers caused such a hubbub — the hashtag #MagnoliaParks got millions of views — the books were reprinted under a Penguin Random House imprint with new covers. Now, over on Goodreads.com, people are “literally crying” about the latest book and the frenzied aftershocks from it will surely be felt on social media for months.
Protagonist Magnolia Parks and B.J. Ballentine are painted as the couple to be, even as they — and their friends — consistently engage in extremely bad decision making. They are, in a word, human.
Defending problematic behavior by characters in this book isn’t necessary. It’s the kind of thing readers expect from this series. Yet this time, Ms. Hastings also dives deep into the murky depths of grief, while still moving the pace along and, somehow, making readers laugh.
Grief comes round again
[Note: The following contains spoilers for previous books in this series]
At the end of the previous book, “Magnolia Parks: The Long Way Home,” Magnolia’s sister Bridget dies, so the aptly titled “Into the Dark” follows that aftermath, as well as tackling eating disorders, miscarriage and sexual assault.
AsB.J. says when the book begins, grief is “a steep dip down on a roller coaster we’re already strapped in on. Theride’s already started.”
Anyone who has ever mourned someone will feel this book. The ferris wheel of grief comes around and around again. “Into the Dark” does an exemplary job of portraying this while staying true to characters’ voices.
A reader might get emotional whiplash from Ms. Hasting’s writing style, which can take one from laughing to crying in two sentences. She does it in a sneaky way that makes readers forget they are reading a book that feels, at times, like a soap opera meets “Gossip Girl.”
“You know how ballerinas pick a spot to look at when they’re doing a pirouette so they don’t get dizzy? Bridget was Magnolia’s spot on the wall,” Ms. Hastings writes.
Ms. Hastings breaks conventions, employing contractions not often used (mustn’t’ve, for example), and she also teaches readers that American tampons are inferior to those in England. She doesn’t mind if audiences don’t know about “strops” or about the British phrase “lost the plot,” nor will she hesitate to have two characters begin to dialogue in Russian out of the blue.
Readers will either love or hate that this book drops the unusual, academic-paperstyle citations her other books use.
Even Ms. Hastings’ author bio goes rogue. At the end of each book, she marks where she is and what she’s doing at that moment in time. As she wrote this book, for example, she was bingewatching “Modern Family.”
Fans of the “Daisy Haites” companion series will love how holes in those stories are woven into this book, like watching the same scenes fromvarying perspectives.
As Magnolia muses, “Time can be a bit like that, don’t you think? it doesn’t hurt when you’re losing it as much as it does when you see in retrospect how much you lost.”
Readers will laugh often and also feel the book’s hurt, anger, loss and joy deeply. Yet it’s the mastery of voice in this book that will take fans into the dark and, perhaps, back out.