A distinctive debut from a promising author.
Intertwined tales of longing, regret, and the Holocaust.
This collection takes its title from the first story, in which a woman wishing that any one of the men who has left her would come back finds them all on her doorstep. When they tell her that she can have them all or she can remain alone, she sets them an impossible task. Suffused with a desperate desire for lives that might have been, this affecting fable sets the tone for the fiction to come. In “For Somebody So Scared,” a woman named Bridget remembers how the greatest love of her life, Kaye, made it inevitable that she would abandon her. In “From Somebody So Scared,” Kaye describes the moment when, after an absence lasting decades, Bridget returns. We see a similar device in “I Am Going To Lose Everything I Have Loved” and “To Lose Everything I Have Ever Loved,” both stream-of-consciousness stories narrated by a woman named Dinah. In the former, she presents herself as a familiar figure: the woman who doesn’t want to know that her married lover is never going to leave his wife. She is as self-obsessed as she is obsessed with Samuel, and she radiates damage. What makes her heartbreaking is that she is haunted. She’s haunted by her grandmother who survived the camps, and she also feels like the cousins who never had a chance to be born because of the Holocaust have a claim on her life and her body. In the sequel story, Dinah discovers that winning her lover for herself doesn’t mean that she can trust love. Although this is Sender’s first book, she’s no novice. She has an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She’s a Yaddo and McDowell fellow. And she has published in such well-known journals as Kenyon Review and Prairie Schooner. There are stories here that feel immature—more like student exercises than finished works—but Sender’s willingness to explore primal hurts makes her fiction compelling.
A distinctive debut from a promising author.Pub Date: March 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781952271786
Page Count: 208
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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
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
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