A provocative exploration of the ties that bind and the mad hatred that kills.
Driven to somehow expunge the stain of her racist upbringing, a young woman from a white supremacist family dedicates her entire life to becoming the ultimate double agent.
It’s not surprising that the Nazi-loving male figures in Rubin’s “near historical fiction novel” (set in the years prior to the Oklahoma City bombing) are terrible husbands, fathers, brothers, and uncles. Sarah Cartell, the earnest protagonist in the eye of this storm of would-be stormtroopers, already understands this by the time she’s 8 years old and is sentenced along with her siblings to do penance on the rocky shores of “kneeling beach.” The kids’ crime? “Mixing” with a boy new to Goderich, Ontario, named Curtis Otonga, the son of a Nigerian doctor now working as a janitor at the local grade school. Sarah’s trespasses continue when, at 14, she and Curtis secretly become an item and she lands a job assisting the neighborhood librarian, Mrs. Broder. The librarian takes young Sara under her wing and reveals the awful truth about the girl’s Holocaust-denying “Grandpa” Thomas Cartell. Determined to not only escape the Cartell clan but also to thwart it, Sarah heads off to McGill University in Montreal on a mission to bring the white supremacists down before they and their clandestine network of skinheads and Nazi sympathizers can cause more harm. She does her best to break through the walls she’s erected around herself and manages to form close friendships with the very kind of people the Cartells abhor. But the increasing stress of being both a progressive university student and an undercover faux Nazi ultimately becomes too much for Sarah to manage, and she finds herself committed to the Sunnyside Mental Health Centre under the care of Mona Rubinoff, who helps Sarah deal with the painful familial complexities inherent in being one of the Cartell clan’s unhappy progeny.
Rubin excels at keeping the humanity tied up in Sarah’s thorny situation front and center. Although committed to confronting the Cartell’s ignorant brand of evil head on, Sarah cannot simply eliminate the familial bonds that she shares with them—no matter how much she loathes their tainted worldview. Sarah can’t even reconcile the animal attraction she feels for her boyfriend Marc and her absolute revulsion regarding every sickening racist thing he advocates. The increasing angst and turmoil roiling inside Sarah’s slight 104-pound frame is rendered with startling realness, only increasing as the young woman further pursues her life’s mission. The author achieves this level of authenticity through the use of lean prose and stark dialogue, which often crackles with the energy of exchanges in a John Cassavetes movie. Readers are practically airdropped into Goderich, Ontario, to meet young Sarah Cartell in summer of 1982 and continue on with her all the way to the Sunnyside Mental Health Centre in the mid-1990s; the “in the moment” feeling Rubin achieves is even more impressive when considering that the dark back story of the Cartell men (and two women who managed to escape their hateful existence) runs concurrently throughout Sarah’s intense journey.
A provocative exploration of the ties that bind and the mad hatred that kills.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781998206308
Page Count: 200
Publisher: re:books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.
A woman faces a health crisis and obsesses over a local accident in this wonderful follow-up to Sandwich (2024).
Newman begins her latest with a quote from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know—it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.” It sets an appropriate tone for a story that is just as full of death and dread as it is laughter. Two years after the events of Sandwich, Rocky is back home in Western Massachusetts and happily surrounded by family—her daughter, Willa, lives with her and her husband, Nick, while applying to Ph.D. programs; her widowed father, Mort, has moved into the in-law apartment behind their house. When a young man who graduated from high school with Rocky’s son, Jamie, is hit by a train, Rocky finds herself spiraling as she thinks about how close the tragedy came to her own family. She’s also freaking out about a mysterious rash her dermatologist can’t explain. Both instances are tailor-made for internet research and stalking. As Rocky obsessively googles her symptoms and finds only bad news (“Here’s what’s true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don’t write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!”), she also compulsively checks the Facebook page of the accident victim’s mother. Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines (one passage about the absurdity of collecting a stool sample and delivering it to the doctor stands out). As Rocky deals with the byzantine frustrations of the medical system, she also has to learn, once more, how to see her children, husband, father, and herself as fully flawed and lovable humans.
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063453913
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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