A set of captivating tales of strangers in a very strange land.
Russian immigrants in America ponder the meaning of life, navigate supernatural experiences, and search for lost treasure in Budman’s story cycle.
This collection centers on a man known only as “the interpreter of dreams and afflictions”—a semiretired, Russian-born Jewish engineer now living in Boston, where he works as an online medical interpreter for Russian-speaking patients. He and his unnamed wife, in their spare time, help care for their two young granddaughters. In these meandering stories, the interpreter recalls his family’s history in the Soviet Union, where they weathered persecution and exile; conveys gentle life lessons to his grandchildren; observes the medical melodramas of the patients; stages whimsical funerals for a goldfish and a tick; and, in the fraught title story, confronts a mass shooter at an immigrant community center. Some of his adventures are wondrous: He tries out a variety of eternal-youth potions but gets cold feet when he recalls how callow and selfish young people are; receives dream visitations from biblical patriarch Joseph, who dispenses terse advice; and hones his talent for floating up to the ceiling. Intertwined with his narrative is a subplot about Piotr Osipovich Voronin, a penniless Russian immigrant in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, who hopes to recover priceless pearls hidden in ornate pillows that his aunt mailed to America, and Penelopa Belkina, a strapping young woman from Odessa, Ukraine, who uses her computer- hacking skills to help Piotr locate the pillows—in return for a hefty cut of the loot. Their quests introduce them to oddball Americans, including someone with a fair-sized arsenal who also collects teddy-bear figurines and an unemployed woman enduring the purgatory of job-search seminars. Eventually, the quest leads to the interpreter’s doorstep—after he buys one of the fateful pillows.
Budman crafts a story collection that reads more like a novella, exploring coherent, resonant themes, such as the exhilaration that immigrants feel regarding America’s opportunities and their bafflement at its alienating culture; the deep changes in perspective wrought by aging; and the uncertainties of attempting to communicate with and understand other people. His fictional world has a Dostoevskian feel to it; its characters are steeped in metaphysical rumination and spiritual yearnings, which lead to material calculations and occasional eruptions of shocking violence. Full of mordant wit, colorful characters, and disorienting swerves, Budman’s text brims with evocative detail when relating squalid realism—“He spent his fiftieth birthday the night before cursing his fate in heavily accented English, drinking stale Diet Coke mixed with a few drops of leftover vodka, munching on his last Triscuit,”—and bizarrely matter-of-fact magical realism: “The Green Man stands alone on the sidewalk of a new housing development where every house is at least half a million in Earth money….His eyes are undiluted anthracite with speckles of white. His skin is poison-green, the color that makes you think of an industrial spill.” The result is a dazzling read with true philosophical depth amid wild flights of fancy.
A set of captivating tales of strangers in a very strange land.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2022
ISBN: 9781604893342
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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