An entertaining magical-realist tale of a marriage threatened by an infidelity.
Two women fight over a man by slightly supernatural means in this novel about bad relationships.
Brewer’s tale triangulates Rawley Aimes, the first mate on an oil tanker; his wife, Marina, a pulchritudinous architect in Rio de Janeiro; and his lover, Lil, the ship’s cook, a blowsy redhead who holds him in erotic thrall. Marina pines for Rawley while he’s at sea but is beset by visions of him copulating sweatily with Lil and reading erotic poetry to her. When Rawley returns to Rio on shore leave, Marina plies him with food and sex. But Rawley, drunk, dejected, and mesmerized by a vision of Lil undergoing a Santeria ritual, tells the distraught Marina that he wants a divorce. His resolve is complicated yet not deterred when he swims to an isolated beach and meets Sibele, a teenager who reads his fortune from tarot cards and tells him that things probably won’t work out with Lil but that Marina will take him back. Rawley jets off to a vacation with Lil in Costa Rica, and she indeed proves to be a handful. She’s hypersexual but also grumpy, soused, and enraged by the rainy weather. Things seem to improve when the sun returns, but then Rawley abruptly dumps Lil in a scene that plays out in alternating bouts of tearful recrimination, histrionic guilt, and sex. Marina welcomes Rawley back as predicted, but once in Rio, he lapses into his old funk, drinking and dreaming of Lil. When Lil calls, he promises to return to her. At wits’ end, Marina hires a seer who tells fortunes from random Bible verses. The psychic senses a malevolent presence in the apartment and, when Rawley’s reading is unusually morbid, hints that witchcraft may be afoot.
Brewer’s yarn features tense domestic drama, lurid rites, vividly atmospheric writing—“A blood red moon hung heavy in the lower sky above the waves, rheumy and dull, like the eye of a killer”—and some well-wrought action set pieces, like an attempted rescue at sea during a raging storm. (“The lifeboat groaned and popped under the strain and visibly bowed between the two logs, which worked to stove it in. The rescuers watched in horror as blood began to pour from the little man’s nose and mouth and as his determined look turned to resignation.”) The sex scenes can feel overblown—“He entered her with force and thrust with the power of the booming ocean, pulling her hair across her back like the guiding mane of an unbridled horse.” But when the carnal thunder subsides, Brewer’s shrewdly observant prose ably conveys the ways relationships go sour through subtle details of bickering and body language (“Marina leaned across and hugged him to her hard, then kissed him long and passionately. His hands hovered just off her back and patted her softly now and then”). The character studies are sharply etched and realistic—so much so that they make painfully clear why all the players ought to abandon one another. Marina’s clingy oversolicitousness is suffocating; Lil’s volatility and peevishness are exhausting; and Rawley’s diffident refusal to commit—“I don’t know” is his mealy mouthed refrain—is infuriating. Readers may conclude that no amount of sorcery can or should keep any of them together.
An entertaining magical-realist tale of a marriage threatened by an infidelity.Pub Date: July 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-955955-45-4
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Goldtouch Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.
Two struggling authors spend the summer writing and falling in love in a quaint beach town.
January Andrews has just arrived in the small town of North Bear Shores with some serious baggage. Her father has been dead for a year, but she still hasn’t come to terms with what she found out at his funeral—he had been cheating on her mother for years. January plans to spend the summer cleaning out and selling the house her father and “That Woman” lived in together. But she’s also a down-on-her-luck author facing writer’s block, and she no longer believes in the happily-ever-after she’s made the benchmark of her work. Her steadily dwindling bank account, though, is a daily reminder that she must sell her next book, and fast. Serendipitously, she discovers that her new next-door neighbor is Augustus Everett, the darling of the literary fiction set and her former college rival/crush. Gus also happens to be struggling with his next book (and some serious trauma that unfolds throughout the novel). Though the two get off to a rocky start, they soon make a bet: Gus will try to write a romance novel, and January will attempt “bleak literary fiction.” They spend the summer teaching each other the art of their own genres—January takes Gus on a romantic outing to the local carnival; Gus takes January to the burned-down remains of a former cult—and they both process their own grief, loss, and trauma through this experiment. There are more than enough steamy scenes to sustain the slow-burn romance, and smart commentary on the placement and purpose of “women’s fiction” joins with crucial conversations about mental health to add multiple intriguing layers to the plot.
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0673-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Jove/Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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