A hopeful tale of improbable friendships, whirlwind romances, and unexpected joy.
In 1885 Paris, a young girl contracts a mysterious disease that sends her on the journey of a lifetime.
Aubry Tourvel is 9 when she and her sisters, Pauline and Sylvie, stumble across a strange well in a courtyard secreted between empty apartment buildings. The well is made of smooth gray stone, and its opening has been carved to resemble a face. The siblings assume it’s a wishing well, and because the papers are full of terrible news, each resolves to sacrifice something precious for the greater good. Pauline drops in a gold chain to stop the socialists from bombing public buildings, and Sylvie gives up her doll so that Dr. Homais might cure syphilis. Aubry intends to ask for Mrs. Von Bingham’s ailing baby to heal, but when the time comes, she refuses to relinquish her prized possession: a wooden puzzle ball she discovered in a dead man’s driveway and that inexplicably finds her whenever they separate. That night, Aubry starts having seizures. She improves en route to the doctor, but upon heading home, begins bleeding from her nose, ears, and mouth. She soon realizes that to stay alive, she must keep moving, never to remain in one location for longer than three days or visit the same place twice. Part magical realism–laced travelogue, part love letter to the world, Westerbeke’s extraordinary debut spans decades, unfolding via stories told by Aubry to those she meets while circumnavigating the globe. Wonder and a sense of loneliness infuse each telling, from a stint on a Greek fishing vessel, to a love affair on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, to solo sojourns in impossible libraries seemingly located outside of space and time. Striking set pieces, stunning character work, and evocative, insightful prose make every page worth savoring.
A hopeful tale of improbable friendships, whirlwind romances, and unexpected joy.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668026069
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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