A wild, comic tale about a zany startup and its discontents that struggles with clarity.
A startup prepares to launch revolutionary tooth implants as chaos reigns at the company and an FDA trial looms in Goldstein’s novel.
Chauncey Orbaugh III is called Trace, a nickname that stuck “due to a misspelling of the Spanish number three he had made on a junior high test that he never lived down.” His investment firm funds TeeGentics, a raucous startup that claims it will revolutionize the dental market with low-cost genetically engineered tooth implants. The company promises that their test tube-grown teeth will be perfect and white and help countless millions around the world—for a fee of $99.99 per tooth. TeeGentics’s product is the brainchild of Dr. Werner Brandt and is partially funded by a foundation overseen by Liz Cleaver, heir to a cannabis company. All is not well at TeeGentics: The teeth have immense potential, but they’re untested, and an FDA trial is upcoming. New head of research Bob Oppenheimer is tackling the problem of tooth death, since the implants are actually dying after a week. He recommends a DNA fertilizer to supercharge the teeth, but when lab assistant Billy becomes a test subject, the side effects are troubling—his libido explodes and he gets a permanent erection, followed by impotence. When FDA agents arrive at TeeGentics and start asking questions, Trace can barely keep his sanity—let alone the company—intact, with everything seemingly on the verge of collapse. Goldstein’s riotous novel about a wacky biotech startup runs the gamut from plausible to outlandish, with all the action happening at a frenetic pace. It’s a fun idea, and the characters feel authentic in their stressed-out roles. In the midst of the chaos, though, some scenes don’t go anywhere, and the hazy language used in descriptions can make the story hard to follow. The third act is easier to swallow and becomes enjoyable to read, but the path there has some obstacles as well.
A wild, comic tale about a zany startup and its discontents that struggles with clarity.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9798458128315
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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