Greenwell—such a finely tuned, generous writer—transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life.
Greenwell, who has written so evocatively about desire and sex in What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), now probes something quite different: life-threatening illness.
With no warning and a violent eruption of pain so intense it felt like someone “plunged a hand into [his] gut and grabbed hold and yanked,” the narrator suffers an infrarenal aortic dissection—a tear of the inner layer of his aorta. It’s a sometimes fatal malady that usually happens to people older than the narrator, who’s in his 40s. Deeply reluctant during the pandemic to go to the hospital in Iowa City, he endures the pain at home until his partner, L, convinces him to get treatment. The medical staff is alarmed, and also titillated, by encountering such a rare malady. The narrator of this autofiction endures lab test after lab test and must learn how to be powerless—how, for example, to refrain from using the bathroom near his ICU bed by himself or how to walk there without tangling the many wires and IV lines threaded from his body. As usual in a Greenwell novel, the tangents are tantalizing, and with so much time spent inert and left to ponder, the narrator finds his imagination flying beyond his hospital bed to the fracturing of his family, his life with and love for L, and the implications of their disastrous home renovations. But this is a novel about bodies and how weird they are, and Greenwell often returns to thinking about them. “What a strange thing a body is,” he writes, “…and how strange to have hated it so much, when it had always been so serviceable, when it had done more or less everything I had needed until now, when for more than forty years it had worked so well.” There’s more suspense here than in Greenwell’s previous work, as the reader is eager to discover the outcome of the narrator’s illness: How will he get out of the ICU and return to life?
Greenwell—such a finely tuned, generous writer—transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780374279547
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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