A complex and engrossing family tale with strong characters.
This sequel revisits a troubled family as it wrestles with love in all its beautiful and terrible forms.
The novel begins in 1973. Noël Trudeau, ex-wife of Leon Ziemny, is pregnant. Against her doctor’s dire warning, she gives birth to a daughter, Willow, and dies. Fast-forward to the late ’90s. Armed with her mother’s diary, Willow is determined to probe her past. She embarks on a trip that takes her to her mother’s grave in Willow, Ohio, and then to the Ziemnys, still in the steel town of Langston, Indiana. Old Walt Ziemny is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but the disease soon starts moving fast. His son Ricky, an artist, never married after Noël wed Leon instead of him. That union imploded, and Leon and his second wife, Stella, have, for over 25 years, been in a marriage that died long ago. Then Willow shows up, claiming that Noël was her aunt while she tries to figure things out, test the waters. Slowly, she becomes accepted even if she is still a mystery. Eventually, an important family secret is revealed. Like the author’s previous novel, The Moonstoners(2019),this second volume of a trilogy shows Dzikowski to be a very sensitive observer and writer. Even though the old Polish neighborhood in Langston is changing, the author paints a loving picture of the area, anchored by the parish church and Walt’s tavern, the Mazurka Inn. There are no missteps here, and there are wonderful character studies, especially of Walt and Leon. Walt was the only one to accept Noël from the get-go. Now, his Alzheimer’s is painful for the whole family (and clearly Dzikowski knows a lot about the condition). Leon has always been locked up tight, pushing people away, and readers will want to scream at him, shake him. Willow could be his salvation. He ultimately begins a new life—a better life for a better man. Because everything has been so hard won, the final peace is all the sweeter. Readers will be eagerly awaiting the author’s next installment.
A complex and engrossing family tale with strong characters.Pub Date: June 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9840305-6-9
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Wiara Books
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
There is only one Patricia Lockwood, and this surreal, silly, and sneakily profound book could only be hers.
In the wake of a disorienting illness, a woman attempts to write “a masterpiece about being confused.”
What on earth is happening to the unnamed protagonist of this novel? She suffers from “bizarre nonsense dreams,” feels there is “a secret number between two and three,” and sees “a zigzag” in the corner of her eye that she refers to as “the angel.” Has an unnamed illness “stolen her old mind and given her a new one?” We’re told she “first got sick” in March 2020, and because the details of the protagonist’s life and work track so closely with the author’s, we assume it is Covid-19, which left Lockwood in a post-Covid fog, described in an essay for the London Review of Books. This is no straightforward illness diary, but a “mad notebook” capturing the sensory experience and psychic state of a character in extremis. It opens with a family trip to Scotland, seemingly before the pandemic—but never mind, linearity and narrative are beside the point. In Scotland, the protagonist suddenly believes in fairies; throughout the book she is obsessed with changelings, doppelgängers, knockoff Cabbage Patch Kids, cloned sheep, Mrs. Doubtfire, a potential TV adaptation of her memoir, Priestdaddy, and all manner of facsimiles that point toward the existential question of the title. Somewhat incidentally, she reads and feverishly analyzes Anna Karenina, tries her hand at metalworking, and, after her husband undergoes emergency surgery that leaves him with 36 staples in the abdomen, finds herself “in charge of the Wound.” Wherever this phantasmagoric book takes us, it is shot through with a poet’s love for the slippery absurdities of language and abundant laugh-out-loud gags. Can we hope for a one-woman show?
There is only one Patricia Lockwood, and this surreal, silly, and sneakily profound book could only be hers.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593718551
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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