A heartfelt, page-turning tale that effectively stands on its own while also living up to its predecessor.
Bobbitt offers a post-apocalyptic sequel about the surviving residents of Cedar Key, Florida, as they defend their home island and disappearing way of life.
Roughly a year after the nuclear meltdown that precipitated the events of Godspeed, Cedar Key (2024),the remaining few hundred residents of the titular locale—about a quarter of its former population—are slowly rebuilding their economy and infrastructure. Despite damage from nuclear fallout and extreme weather, the locals have managed to start breeding chickens again and have even mastered using slow-burning wood to create fuel for cars and boats. Although the once-central clamming industry is no longer viable, some fauna have returned to the island, including a bounty of white shrimp. The story opens with the marriage of Cedar Key’s Luke Buck to a woman named Kinsey from Sumner, on the mainland. Their wedding symbolizes a tenuous peace between the two communities, who came to blows over old grudges and dwindling resources in the early days of the “new world.” As it happens, the wedding isn’t the only cause for celebration, because Col. Robert McCloud—long assumed dead—returns in a dramatic crash landing after more than a year on the mainland. Sent out from Cedar Key for reconnaissance, the colonel was shot down in the wilds of Florida, surviving only by using his old Marine Corps training. He discovers in short order that he was shot down by Isaac Skipjack, a known entity on the island and the son of Buddy Skipjack, a fisherman who was caught stealing clams in the late 1990s and later died in the back of a police car. Now, years later, Isaac is leading a Coast Guard ship full of other mainlanders, with violence on his mind.
Bobbitt’s follow-up to his debut offers a reading experience that many readers will find similar to that of the first installment, which is a very good thing. Like its predecessor, this novel brims with characters whose attachments to one another feel real and carry emotional weight. For example, Mark David—a Cedar Key fisherman and the father of young mayor Hayes David—took young Isaac in years ago, but the boy soon discovered that Mark may have been involved in his biological father’s death. In addition, the author’s expertise about the culture and geography of the part of the country in which the series is set makes for a richly detailed, authentic-feeling read: “When the bay is glassy calm, and the tide is low, it’s easy for the farmer to think big thoughts about what everything means, to find allegory in a diving cormorant, metaphor in the interplay of light and water.” Such vivid prose abounds in these pages, and the action scenes studded throughout the narrative—most especially, the gun and naval battles in which characters on both sides of the conflict fight and die—make for a propulsive narrative through which readers will be happy to travel.
A heartfelt, page-turning tale that effectively stands on its own while also living up to its predecessor.Pub Date: June 7, 2025
ISBN: 9798218668853
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Aphroditois Books
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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