A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.
A genre-bending book that grapples with the diffuse and uncategorizable enormity of personal loss.
A woman wakes alone in her guest bedroom, grieving the dissolution of her marriage to an emotionally manipulative writer. A woman returns home to her apartment, spying a pool of blood creeping under the neighbor’s door. Each woman narrates one half of Lacey’s latest literary experiment, a recursive story told in two parts: a novella and a memoir entwined with one another. The effect is unsettling, like experiencing the lost memory of a book even as you turn its pages. “I felt I’d been shrunk down and shoved into a doll’s house, and I knew then—again, or for the first time—how grief expands as it constricts, how it turns a person into a toy version of herself,” Lacey writes in the opening page of the memoir section. The “toy version of herself” might be what Lacey transposes into the novella, about a woman confronting her role in the end of her marriage while growing ever more anxious about a possible murder next door. Then again, maybe not. “Ha ha, we said, yet again someone has confused the voice of a fictional character for an authorial statement of belief,” Lacey and her husband assure one another in the memoir. Across both sections of the book, Lacey offers meditations on faith, violence, friendship, and dislocation. With scalpellike precision, she teases out connections between her childhood experiences with loving and losing God and losing her faith in love as an adult. There are no easy endings in this doubled book, just an infinity loop of questions and possibilities, a twinned bank of pay phones ringing in the night, waiting for someone to answer.
A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780374615406
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
In Geller’s debut novel, a husband and wife face tough decisions when doctors diagnose their young son with a rare liver disease.
Marcia and Michael Kleinman’s marriage—already sailing on rough waters—hits the rocks when a sudden onset of jaundice sends their son, Max, to the doctor. Initially inconclusive, tests eventually show a rare condition that will likely require a liver transplant. This crisis forces Marcia, the novel’s protagonist, to face the problems in her marriage and her dissatisfaction with life in general. Her mother was once a classical pianist (she recorded a few albums that “didn’t sell particularly well”), and Marcia also dreamed of a career as a musician, until marriage and motherhood sidetracked her. Now, faced with an ailing son, she plays piano again, finding release in her attempts to master some of Beethoven’s most challenging sonatas. Author Geller understands the drive of the artist. “It’s not the notes exactly,” Marcia says; it’s “capturing it. Capturing the music.” A neat sentiment—the difference between knowing technique and knowing music lies in the heart of the true artist—but one that perhaps underlines a problem with this novel: Sometimes it feels like Geller knows the notes but lacks the music. As such, the interpersonal notes—the overbearing mother, the distant husband, etc.—feel over-rehearsed, rote and drained of invention, leading to a finale that flirts with melodrama. Yet the novel succeeds because Geller, a pathologist, spends most of his time focused on a realm he understands very well: the world of medicine. There aren’t many works of fiction that focus so completely—and so devastatingly—on the process of illness: the meetings, the waiting, the diagnoses, etc. All of this is communicated with the cool tone of a great doctor giving a patient the bad news while looking her in the eye.
Medical drama outweighs interpersonal drama in this affecting debut.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1481762328
Page Count: 290
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasantly photographed slice-of-life tale.
Two siblings describe their love by praising the other in this photo-based picture book.
In the first part of this work, baby Tiwa describes how her older sibling, Deji, “is my superhero, and I’m pretty sure my mom’s too,” as he helps to feed, change, and hold her. When Tiwa cries, he sings to her, and he promises to always be there for her. Deji’s narrative, which follows, is longer, as he describes how much he wanted and prayed for a baby sibling. When his mother became pregnant, he was sure the baby would be a “sweet little sister.” After staying with his grandmother during Tiwa’s birth, Deji got to meet and hold the newborn at the hospital. This eye-catching portrait of sibling love is filled with full-color photographs of a Black family, showing the progress of Tiwa’s development. (A few identical photos appear in both Tiwa’s and Deji’s sections.) It also uses vocabulary that newly independent readers will find easily accessible. Deji’s faith-based worldview is likely to resonate in homes in which prayer and God are regularly discussed. Adeosun’s simple sentence structure convincingly gets across the youngsters’ voices. Deji’s love for Tiwa is evident in both the text and photographs, and it may inspire older siblings to become better helpers at home.
A pleasantly photographed slice-of-life tale.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982260-78-1
Page Count: 24
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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