Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky
Marcy Dermansky is that girl!!! Hot Air is, well, a breath of fresh air. This is a comedy of errors, a mother-daughter love story, a Rashomon-style cast of unreliable narrators, and the best portrayal of the horrors of Universal Studios I’ve seen in print. I love a book that makes me learn how to read it, and Dermansky’s prose is wry, funny, and laser-sharp. I loved Hurricane Girl, her last novel, and Hot Air delivered on its weird, loving promise. Stunner!
Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky, (List Price: $27, Knopf, 9780593320907, March 2025)
Reviewed by Rachel Knox, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida
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For me, stories begin with a curiosity, a question that won’t let me go. For The Story She Left Behind, that question was: What happened to Barbara Newhall Follett and her language? I was captivated by the real-life mystery of this child prodigy who published a fantasy novel at twelve years old, invented a language, and then vanished without a trace at twenty-five. I knew I would fictionalize her so I started imagining a daughter left behind by a mother’s disappearance (the real Barbara never had a child), and a book that daughter could not decipher as it was written in her mother’s made-up language. The more I thought about it, the more I knew—this wasn’t just a story about a missing woman, it was a story about how we find ourselves in the things left behind.
