A dazzling collection of satisfying tales consistent in theme, dexterity, and impressive execution.
A volume offers sweet and savory short stories grounded by the human condition.
San Antonio poet and author Salinas bases his 40-tale collection primarily on his South Texas homeland, where characters deal with love, young adult angst and insecurity, death, and the bonds of family. The homespun opening story, “Places,” is a first-person–narrated winner about a divorced son mourning his mother’s death. In a family hobbled by the father’s sudden abandonment, the only saving grace appears when the protagonist’s estranged bachelor brother returns home. The interactions between fatherless brothers also populate other tales, like “Even-Steven,” in which two siblings discuss the life-changing “accident” that scarred them both. Simmering with anger and guilt, the brothers attempt a resolution while perched on the edge of a cliff. Straightforward and bare-knuckle, the author’s characters have no hidden agendas. Men consider women who have blond hair but brown eyes instead of blue to be “prisoners of predetermination”; White folks in South Texas comically dub themselves “white Mexican’t.” For the most part, these are stories about people for whom the struggle is very real. They may be short on cash, luck, and education, but they are rich in their experiences with life’s simple pleasures and the satisfactions of a good day’s work. Some tales veer off into their own worlds, as when a young man questions the identity of a trainee at a starship academy. The rest are indelibly human, best represented in the endearingly bittersweet first date at an IHOP between a nerd who does impressions and a community college “trailer-park girl.” Collectively, these stories represent life’s imperfections, and Salinas is skilled in mapping out the bones of his tales in an economy of pages. He is adept at cleverly outlining characters and their concerns while creating a variety of situations that will engulf readers. The drawback to this writerly flair is that readers will often find themselves at the finales wanting more, as in “Coke Machine,” the tale of a mall janitor assisting a shopper obsessed with a wall that she believes conceals a vault. The same can be said of the title story, involving a young, restless, likable insurance worker whose magical thinking seems to be the only thing giving him hope for the future.
A dazzling collection of satisfying tales consistent in theme, dexterity, and impressive execution.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73617-796-9
Page Count: 278
Publisher: San Antonio Review
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
