An erudite, melancholy consideration of love, loss, and the immortality of text.
A professor investigates traces of a long-ago affair in MacKinnon’s delicate palimpsest of a novel.
Irish-born Flora Bowles Lijak lives in late-Victorian-era England and marries a Polish exile. Decades later, she tries to write the truth of her brief, incandescent affair with the American anarchist Billy McKenzie. Their romance, sparked in the charged milieu of fin-de-siècle London radicalism, is doomed by ideology, geography, and history. Billy dies abroad, betrayed; Flora survives, entombed in her marriage and her memories. In 1918 New York, she glimpses his ghost in Washington Square (“She did not believe in spirits, yet Billy’s apparition – striding smartly along, his face set like flint, his hair dusted with snow – had been as vivid as life”). The sight unleashes both grief and revelation. A century later, Ozzie Hosseini, a Georgetown professor with her own tragic story, stumbles upon Flora’s unpublished manuscript and reconstructs her life through letters, archives, and spectral traces of text. Ozzie roams Greenwich Village with her camera, folding past into present and scholarship into séance. Beneath the novel’s scholarly rigor runs a feminist reclamation of a woman’s voice, silenced by propriety, that insists on being heard. Themes of memory, authorship, erotic freedom, and historical recovery drive the intricate narrative. MacKinnon’s prose—elegant, dryly witty, and thick with archival texture—is agile enough to move between worlds without embalming the past. The settings of Victorian London, early 20th century Manhattan, and contemporary Washington, D.C., feel researched yet lived-in, and the metafictional framing lends contemporary resonance to Flora and Ozzie’s struggles. The novel’s scholarship sometimes overshadows its sentiment, but this imbalance seems partly intentional; emotion survives via annotation. In the end, MacKinnon delivers both a conventional romance and a moving meditation on how stories outlast the bodies they once described.
An erudite, melancholy consideration of love, loss, and the immortality of text.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798992958003
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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