A quixotic exploration of the recent past that reveals something far deeper about how we will remember the future.
Friends talk their way through the 24-hour news cycle during what turns out to be an inflection point in history.
It’s June 2016. A group of friends gather in the courtyard of a New York City bar to discuss their days, their dates, their philosophies of art and life. In November there will be an election whose consequences can’t quite be imagined yet. The Brexit vote goes through in England. In Minnesota, Philando Castile is shot to death at a traffic stop by police. As a cohesive book, this novella resists definition—both in terms of its construction and its central energy. The friends break into the day-by-day, diaristic format of the narrative—which includes shopping lists, the plots of movies, and the news of the day with equal import—to tell their own stories of chance encounters, overheard conversations, or personal epiphanies. In San Francisco, John, the curator of these many narrations, goes on a quest to locate the studio where Neil Young recorded the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man for no reason other than to see if he can. In a philosophical throughline, multiple characters bemoan the loss of the analog experience. Speaking again of Young—specifically his habit of working out early drafts of songs live onstage in the pre-YouTube era—one of the friends says, “A form of life, of artistic practice, that required the presence of other people is no longer possible; the audience is no longer able to be there as people, only devices, recording and comparing.” Whether or not this may be true for Neil Young fans, it does not feel true for readers of this book, who wash in and out of the flood of images conjured by John and his friends only to come up hard against the immutable fact of a headline that both binds us to the experience through shared history and underscores the privilege of hindsight. While some readers may search for a point among all this overlaid ephemera, Searls’ insistent return to the moments when analog experiences interrupt the forward momentum of events—a girl taking a surreptitious photo on the train, lizards on a hiking path startled by lightning—show that the book’s real interest lies in the ordinary power of sensation, rather than the flashbulb sensationalism of event.
A quixotic exploration of the recent past that reveals something far deeper about how we will remember the future.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781566897396
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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