A riveting, lyrical tale about a Black gay man’s unflinching odyssey during a cultural upheaval.
In this novel set in 1980s New York City on the cusp of the AIDS crisis, an African American gay man explores the raptures and dangers of his complicated identity.
Slipping away from his job to indulge in anonymous lunch-hour sex in one of Central Park’s gay cruising areas, the narrator, who is only given the nickname Deep Thoughts, notices a sign admonishing pedestrians to “Stay on Paths. Avoid Desire Lines.” But Deep Thoughts’ life has already taken him far from the prescribed path of a working-class Black youth growing up in a 1970s Brooklyn housing project and yearning for the sexy sophistication of Manhattan. His first deviation came when a school desegregation lottery provided entrance to a mostly White school and the superior education it offered while driving “a wedge into my life that would forever separate me from my origins.” His second desire line was his gay identity, which transformed from subconscious longing to physical reality when he was 15 years old. By 1982, he had achieved his Manhattan dreams, living in a tenement in Hell’s Kitchen and inhabiting “a country where convention no longer matters.” Now, his life is fueled by drugs, easily available moments of intense physical release, and the exhilaration of being part of a newly awakening community in which pride still battles with shame. On the fringes of his awareness, newspapers begin to report a new disease with the bleakly ironic acronym AIDS, though “nothing about it promises to be the least bit helpful.” The precision and honesty of Johnson’s writing bring an immediacy and universality to a narrative that is firmly anchored in its historical time and its particular set of marginalized identities. The narrator’s gay world combines hard-boiled hipster coolness with an easily wounded sensitivity. The exultant freedom of the dance club and even the first anonymous sexual experience in a subway bathroom are portrayed with a poetic sensuality that invites empathy. Explorations of the Black experience are similarly nuanced and varied, from a description of the protagonist’s mother’s “proper family” with “good hair and paper-bag tested complexions” to the contradictions of African nations’ emerging from colonization, learned during Deep Thoughts’ Peace Corps stint in Zaire.
A riveting, lyrical tale about a Black gay man’s unflinching odyssey during a cultural upheaval.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9850341-0-3
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Querelle Press
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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