A tart, questioning exploration of how deep racism runs.
A teenager conducts a yearslong effort to shake off his White privilege in Africa, suburbia, and New York.
We meet the title character of Okparanta’s second novel, after Under the Udala Trees (2015), in 2016 in Tanzania, on a safari with his parents, who exemplify ugly (White) Americanism. If Wayne and Chevy aren’t bickering with each other, they’re making casually racist comments and treating the Black tour guides contemptuously. Harry’s embarrassment at their behavior, combined with a connection with one guide, moves the 14-year-old to resent “the prominent paleness of my skin.” Back home in the Pennsylvania suburbs, the rift widens as Wayne, a mediocre teacher, loses his job and pursues ill-advised schemes like attempting to sell 3-D printed guns, while Harry plans his escape. Though Harry detests his parents and makes various anti-racist gestures, he decides to take a scholarship from a group of God-and-flag Whites called Purists (read: Trumpists) to escape his parents and go to college in Manhattan. Okparanta’s satire of White racism and hypocrisy is sometimes cartoonish, especially when it comes to Wayne, but it’s sharp in the latter sections, as when Harry attends meetings of “Transracial-Anon,” a 12-step group that’s less anti-racist and more pro–self-pity, or uses an app called Dignity that effectively removes the burden of how to treat people or when a public act of goodwill by Harry’s Black girlfriend becomes warped by bigots. Harry’s dream of “racial reassignment” is a fool’s errand, of course, but Okparanta suggests that even more modest gestures of allyship don’t meaningfully address racist instincts. The novel comes full circle with a trip to Ghana’s Gold Coast, the one-time center for the slave trade, suggesting that while Harry isn’t exactly his father’s son, he’s inherited a cultural affliction that he can’t shake off.
A tart, questioning exploration of how deep racism runs.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-61727-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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