Brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly believable. Seems destined to be a blockbuster.
When the world’s first Category 6 storm destroys Miami and Houston, a FEMA megashelter in Oklahoma becomes part of the setting for the harsh aftermath, measured in unraveling lives.
“Twenty-four hours ago I was a wealthy surgeon’s wife leaving my huge house with three kids and a dog in a hybrid SUV. Now I’m a sweating, penniless refugee dragging a wheelie bag up a rural road.” In the lingo of Holsinger’s ambitious novel, former rich White lady and sculptor Daphne Larsen-Hall is now an IDP, an Internally Displaced Person—aka a Luna, for the hurricane that created a whole new class of Americans, numbering in the millions. Luna “strikes Miami as if beating on some mountain-size drum....She moves like a drunken butcher, flaying skyscrapers, eviscerating offices and conference rooms and lobbies....The guts of civilization swarm and fly: desks, chairs, tables, carpets, lights, plants, computers, printers, books, and papers by the billions, landing in the rivered streets, pulped through the sewer channels, chewed by the winds.” Holsinger's lush writing about the storm is complemented by “The Great Displacement: A Digital Chronicle of the Luna Migration,” an interactive website including interview transcripts, maps, and charts, displayed here as screenshots. For example, one survivor, now a Ph.D. in critical disaster studies, reports, “Doesn’t surprise me that what finally focused the nation’s attention on the megashelters was that spectacle in Oklahoma, what went down at Tooley Farm. There you had a perfect storm of climate change, displacement, extremism, and racial difference swirling around these white bodies at the center of it all, the big pale eye of the storm.” Interspersed with these reports are chapters telling Daphne’s story as well as those of her three difficult children (her teenage stepson, Gavin, maliciously leaves her purse in the driveway when they flee); the African American woman who runs Tooley Farm for FEMA; the drug dealer/insurance agent who is there to squeeze every penny he can get out of the refugees; and his sidekick/girlfriend, a guitar player who starts the cover band that gives the book its title. From Range, a complicated street game all the children are playing, to wildfire, the opiate many of their parents are getting addicted to, Holsinger's storm of invented detail is Category 6.
Brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly believable. Seems destined to be a blockbuster.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18971-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
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 welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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